Headline, article of the day

It's BS-Time:

According to other sources, we will change to BST on 30 March 2014, i.e. in three weeks.

Fun Online Polls: Greenwich Mean Time & Making Housing Affordable Again

On a very high turnout (thanks to everybody who took part, as ever), the responses to "Greenwich Mean Time versus British Summer Time. Should we..." were as follows:

Try leaving the clocks at GMT all year round - 34%
Try leaving the clocks at BST all year round - 28%
Stick with the current system - 28%
Not bothered - 6%
Other. Please specify. - 5%

Which looks like a slender majority (or is that 'a slender minority'?) in favour of sticking with GMT all year round. I voted for BST all year round as I am a late riser, so anything else is a complete waste of sunlight as far as I am concerned, but this is a democracy and I shall consider myself bound by that once I'm in charge. However, I reserve the right to revisit it after we've had a year or two of solid GMT and seen how it pans out.
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This week's Fun Online Poll, inspired by DBC Reed, comment 2 on this thread at HousePriceCrash, asks "Would you vote for a party which has the manifesto aim of making house prices affordable again?", which is the number one campaign issue of this nutter.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

British European Summertime

Tobias Ellwood MP advances the case for abandonding the silly ritual of putting the clocks forward an hour to BST in March and then back an hour to GMT again in October over at ConHome.

AFAICS, the only upside to this ritual is to provide us with a brilliant pub-quiz type question ("Which is the longest month?"), and I am pretty much sold on the idea of leaving our clocks permanently at BST. To be fair, the only way to find out whether the advantages outweigh any disadvantages (and there must be some - perhaps there'll be more people throwing in the towel if they have to go to work in the dark for several months in winter, but we won't know until we've tried) is just to leave our clocks at BST for a year or two, see what happens and then maybe have a vote on it. Or have a vote on it first. But it must be worth serious consideration.

UPDATE: Re 1968 - 72, see the comments to this post.

Anways, Denis Cooper, who knows about stuff, wades in (on a later thread):

As I have pointed out in a detailed comment on Mr Ellwood's article, this is a matter of EU law - Directive 2000/84/EC - which cannot be changed unilaterally by the UK government.

The UK government does not have the freedom to do what Mr Ellwood wants, which is to move clocks forward by one hour for the whole of the year, unless it also moves them forward by an additional hour for the agreed period of summer time:

"Article 1: For the purposes of this Directive "summer-time period" shall mean the period of the year during which clocks are put forward by 60 minutes compared with the rest of the year."

The concluding passages of my comment may seem harsh, but I'm fed up to the back teeth with UK politicians, especially Tory politicians, abusing their positions of trust by deliberately pulling the wool over the eyes of the public about the EU:

"If Mr Ellwood is unaware that this matter which so greatly exercises him is subject to existing EU law, which cannot be changed unilaterally by the UK, then he's unfit to be a government minister. On the other hand, if he is aware of the EU law but he deliberately chooses not draw the attention of readers to its existence, then he is unfit to be an MP, let alone a government minister."

I stand by that.