NO: Evidence fails to back up claims, says Angus MacNeil

As TIME erodes the old memory of the Commons vote to end the last time experiment of the late 60s and early 70s, (366 to 81) it seems the voices for change grow at an inverse proportion.

However, this year the UK government are making covert signals for a change but then saying Scotland will get an absolute veto. What are they up to?

Earlier this year, the coalition government, with their new helpers in Labour, did not want to devolve power over setting time to Scotland, despite the fact that Northern Ireland already has this power.

Maybe the London coalition is trying to quell their raging throngs of back-benchers with this proposal. We may never know.

The normal pattern of arguments follows along the lines of preference over lighter evenings to lighter mornings; personally I prefer the amount of daylight we get in June, however, as a function of our position on the planet we get less daylight in winter, compensating for our long summer days.

Some argue that in winter we should move the clocks and ourselves relative to the daylight available, making more use of the light at the end of our working day. Extending that logic we could move dawn to be around 4-5pm just as people finished work and thus enjoy the maximum daylight in the “evenings”.

Accident rates are frequently cited as proof that lighter evenings are safer. Well Paris, which is not too far from London and with lighter winter evenings, has a higher accident rate of 31.8 per million in comparison to London’s rate of 23.9 per million.

Others say energy will be saved by lighter evenings, but again evidence triumphs over wishful thinking as empirical evidence from Indiana in the US showed that darker, colder mornings led to more energy consumption.

• Angus MacNeil is SNP MP for the Western Isles