Can we stay in GMT please. (Greenwich)

Member Name: LauraJane

Product:	Greenwich
Date:	15/04/01 (160 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None that I can see.

Disadvantages: Annoying and Costly

This is probably not the right place to put this op. but I've asked for a place to put it and received no answer, so I thought London to be the place for it to go for now. As this is where Greenwich is, even though this op is not about Greenwich itself.

Can anyone see the point of British Summer Time? Every March we all put our clocks forward by 1 hr, what exactly for? It is called daylight saving! How on earth can you save daylight? If there are 12 hrs of daylight, there are 12 hrs of daylight, irrespective of what time you call it. All we are doing is shifting the daylight along by 1 hr of our time.

I know years ago it was meant to have been done for the farmers, as they had to get up early. Don’t many people? I cannot see the relevance in this anymore. I do not think other countries do this, they seem to manage all right.

If it gets light at 5am then after the clocks have been altered it will become light at 6am. Where is the benefit in that? I can see the benefit of making it lighter in the evenings but I thought it was originally to benefit the farmers in the mornings! Someone tell me if I’m wrong. Also as the months go on it is going to get lighter in the mornings and evenings anyway, as we get nearer the sun, without altering the clocks.

There are also a lot of costs involved. Changing timers in nearly everything today. I used to work for a company and twice a year we had to send out people to change the timers in the car park ticket machines. It used to cost a fortune. There are all sorts of machines today relying on time and they all have to be altered twice a year, for what? It is a waste of time and money. Does 1 hour really make that much difference? (Only when you are made to get up an hour earlier!)

Why don’t we just put the clocks back in October and leave them there at the normal Greenwich Mean Time. After a couple of years people will be wondering why we ever bothered. I
’m sure there were a couple of years during the war when it was not done, did it affect anyone?

It would be interesting to see how many people see this practise as a waste of time and money and would rather opt to leave the clocks alone.

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