Lesley Riddoch: We need to see light on time change

It's time for Scots to rethink our kneejerk opposition to darker winter mornings. A Tory Private Members Bill is proposing a cross-departmental government review of the pros and cons of Single/Double British Summer Time (SDST).

This means clocks would not change next October and would advance a further hour the following summer - if evidence supports the case for change. And it does.

Experts suggest SDST would save 80-100 lives, reduce NHS bills by 200 million and energy bills by 138m a year.

Safety campaigners like the plan because more accidents happen in the evening when people are tired and children dawdle back home from school. Conservationists like it because a closer fit between natural daylight and working hours means less energy is consumed - 450,000 tonnes less carbon or the equivalent of taking 200,000 cars off the road every year according to Cambridge academic Dr Elizabeth Garnsey.

Business leaders like it because trade would be easier if Britain joined Central European Time. The tourist and leisure industries like it because longer evenings would attract more visitors and encourage more after-work activity from couch potato Britons. And the British public appear to favour some change - the latest opinion poll found 63 per cent of Londoners and 56 per cent of Scots want to stay on British Summer Time all year round.

The only opponents to change appear to be ... Scottish politicians.

This August David Cameron endorsed the proposed Double Summer Time shift, prompting newspaper claims of outrage north of the Border. A Scottish Government spokesperson (though notably not a minister) said children's lives would be at risk. Angus Brendan MacNeil, Western Isles MP said "David Cameron needs to wake up to the impact these proposals would have on people in Scotland. Plunging Dundee into darkness to boost tourism in Torquay is simply not acceptable."

A handful of comments were posted on The Scotsman's short article. And that's been it. Outrage? There's been more anger over plans to charge a drop-off fee at Edinburgh airport.

And yet, within two days, this non-groundswell of public feeling in Scotland forced the inevitable "clarification" from Scottish Secretary Michael Moore. He assured Scots that Double Summer Time was not current coalition policy, adding: "Any such changes would not be introduced without approval across the UK."

Well six weeks before the clocks go back again as usual - there is some outrage.Mine.

Rebecca Harris may well fail when she arrives in the Commons for a second reading of her Daylight Saving Bill on 3 December because Scottish politicians won't revisit the evidence and coalition parties won't risk provoking an anti-London backlash.

Entrenched Scottish opinion is largely down to misreporting of the 1968/71 double summer time experiment when there were more child casualties in the morning (which the media reported) and far fewer casualties in the evening (which somehow got overlooked).

The result was the implacable opposition of Scots to any further tinkering with time and, according to the normally mild-mannered ROSPA: "Since the 1968/71 experiment, 5,000 people have died and more than 30,000 received serious (road] injuries for no reasons other than entrenched prejudice and lack of political will."

Let's be clear. The 1968/71 experiment proved that lighter evenings saved the lives of Scottish children. So what about the other traditional opponents of change - Scotland's farmers?

NFU Scotland has decided to ask ROSPA for an assessment of how new daylight hours would impact on the safety of Scottish farmers and crofters. ROSPA will clearly gather the facts, but it already unequivocally backs change.

Farmers will never want to fetch hay bales, cattle feed or bedding in the freezing pitch dark of the morning. But times have changed and the NFU confirms that mechanisation means fewer farm tasks have to be performed by hand, outdoors in the winter.

What about the possibility of more northern depression as a result of morning darkness until 10am? Currently Orkney and Shetland are waving goodbye to the near constant daylight of the "simmer dim". Northern Scots have learned to live with the swings and roundabouts of exaggerated seasons - indeed the poet Hugh MacDiarmid once said, "I'd aye be whaur extremes meet" and promptly moved to Shetland.

So why the vicarious outrage on behalf of people who already accept and even enjoy a more variable supply of light and dark than sooth moothers (southerners) will ever know? David Cameron believes two hours more evening sunshine will persuade us to holiday at home, and get our lardy backsides out the door after work to walk the dog, dig the garden or play with the kids. He may be right.

Urban mornings are eaten up with contained panic as adults and children try to get to work and school on congested roads and railways - most early winter rises are already conducted in the dark.

We also currently endure weird spring and autumn shoulder months before the clock changes when the sun rises at the sleep-disturbing hour of 4.30am but still sets at 6pm.

The result is a very long wait for carefree, sunlit evenings and a premature lurch into darkness in October.

It's profoundly disappointing to see that the Scottish Government and some Northern MPs are rising to the bait not to the occasion.Their refusal to re-examine the evidence helps maintain a centuries-old stereotype of Northerners, Highlanders, and by extension the whole of Scotland as nay-saying flat-Earth Luddites who oppose change even when science suggests it benefits them most.

Coming hot on the heels of the Celtic boycott of the proposed AV referendum on the 5 May this kneejerk opposition makes Scots look petty in the extreme and simply fuels the anger of English online bloggers who want Scots to tow our contrary backsides into another timezone.

Indeed the Double Summer Time "debate" characterises the Scottish response to UK structural and constitutional change. Free-thinking is fine - as long as we started it. Scots are not radical, evidence-led or generous players in the UK policy context.

Kneejerk opposition to a perfectly reasonable UK proposal is not what supporters expected from this SNP government - who would do well to conserve their energies for the bigger and more important cross-border battles ahead.