Letters: Time for a shift in thinking over daylight

To be clear, Daylight Saving Time demands the active acceleration of time from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to British Summer Time (BST) in spring, not its passive retardation in autumn.

Notwithstanding this gaffe, there can surely be little doubt that adopting Double BST - which would bring Britain in line with most of Europe - would be beneficial for the majority of the population.

The tired old argument that such a proposal would defile the principles of "true time" is ill-founded. Time has been negotiable since the 19th century, when the daily clock was set by the noon sun resulting in different cities and areas within Britain observing different "time zones".

It was not until the coming of the telegraph machine and the railways, with its incumbent timetables, that the concept of a standard time based on GMT throughout the nation took hold. The introduction of Daylight Saving Time was first championed by William Willett in the early 1900s and debated at length in parliament until it was introduced as an emergency energy-saving measure in 1916 during the Great War, in response to Kaiser Wilhelm II's similar initiative in Germany.

It seems to me that there is no longer any philosophical or practical reason as to why we should not tinker with time to suit our own contemporary circumstances. We need to conserve energy - if we can combine this with enjoying more daylight in the evenings when we are awake, rather than in the early morning when we are asleep, then I'm all for it.

ANDY DAVEY

St Andrews Road

Peebles

Had Joyce McMillan contacted me, she might have understood that while I do not welcome the change in clocks I accept it as a seasonal consequence of mainly our latitude and, to an extent, our longitude. She might also have known that I also favour a period of shorter winter change, which I feel should be five or six weeks symmetrical either side of midwinter, rather than the current asymmetrical period, seven weeks before midwinter and 14 weeks after midwinter before the clocks go forward again.

We should think long and hard before condemning anywhere north of Manchester to sunrise after 9am for eight weeks of the year, which would get more pronounced the further north we travel.

Clocks were created to measure time, but now govern lives and they certainly do not alter the time between sunrise and sunset.

Perhaps Ms McMillan could this winter conduct her own private research: getting up and going to work and doing everything else an hour earlier. Then perhaps she could write an article on her experience in the spring.I would bet she would not be so keen to repeat the experiment next winter.

Ultimately, it is lazy and simplistic for Ms McMillan to claim that my views are merely to be against Westminster especially as there is actually no Westminster view as yet for change.

My arguments are made with the interests of Scotland and the Hebrides in mind.

ANGUS MACNEIL MP

Na h-Eileanan an Iar

Instead of shifting our time constants it might be better to base our start and finish times on local conditions. Communication by e-mail is not time dependent and flexi-time is quite normal. In many businesses, surely it would be more sensible to change our business times.

There is no reason in a global world why everyone should work 9am-5pm. Schools could align start and finish times to suit the local safety of pupils (schools were designed to be places of education and learning not care centres to allow parents to work). They could even adjust their hours to suit the seasons.

Since there would be a core of around six hours per day when Britain and the rest of Europe aligned, it would be no worse than the practice in Australia or the US. Companies, especially in IT, finance or journalism, who deal regularly with the US already work-time shifted hours.

BRUCE D SKIVINGTON

Strath

Gairloch, Wester Ross