I have a cunning plan to get us out of the European Union an hour earlier
‘Time is a devolved matter,” as Albert Einstein famously never said. It is though, legally, in Northern Ireland, as the House of Lords EU committee pointed out this week.
Now, not content with its devilish Irish backstop, the EU wants to seize control of the world’s metaphysical fabric itself and force member states to choose between permanent summertime or everlasting winter. That, at least, is the plan being hatched by the European Commission, which suggests doing away with daylight-saving changes across the Continent.
The clocks will go back tonight, giving us all an extra hour in bed, but ruthlessly cutting off the precious hours of dim sunlight at the end of our dull, wintry days and placing them instead at the start, when many of us are still half asleep.
Brussels has proposed a law to switch this shift from being mandatory to being illegal (everything must be one or the other in the EU mindset). Member states would have to choose between summer and winter and then stick with it.
The Lords are quite right to conclude that this breaks the EU’S principle of subsidiarity, by which decisions should be taken as locally as possible, not that anyone will listen to our parliamentary committees over there at this point. Countries themselves should decide how to manage their time, especially those of us living in northerly climes.
Endowed with this sovereign power, however, we should do exactly what the EU suggests and abolish the shift to wintertime. British summertime was invented a century ago in order to accrue longer, sunnier
It ruthlessly cuts off the hours of dim sunlight at the end of dull, wintry days
evenings. The light is even more precious in winter and, on average, Britons only wake up around the same time as a December sunrise and so waste the first half hour or so yawning and brushing our teeth.
It would be far better to enjoy an extra hour of grey, winter daylight in the evening, rather than scurrying home in the dark. This plan would also get us out of the EU an hour earlier, so no Brexiteer should object.