Now’s our chance to end the clock-changing craziness and reclaim real British time

WHAT would you think of a car speedometer that said you were going 10mph faster or slower than you were? How about bathroom scales that told you that you weighed a stone more than you do? Or perhaps a school ruler that claimed to be a foot long but was actually only ten inches?

The idea is ridiculous. Measures are only any use if they correspond to reality. Yet, as of this morning, almost all the clocks in Britain will be inaccurate, and it will be by official decree. For the next seven months, only a few mouldering sundials will record noon when it actually happens.

Most people will probably not be sure, as they fumble blearily with household devices and timers, which way the clocks ought to be going. The whole thing is a mystery to 95 per cent of the population, yet we dutifully perform the ritual year by year. The time has come to think about it, because we at last have the opportunity to end this silliness. But beware. Zealots and fanatics are still scheming to force you to get up earlier than you want to for the rest of your lives.

The idea behind it is a cranky notion which makes Esperanto look practical. And it dates from the same Edwardian era of fads, cooked up by an irritable property developer, William Willett. He got cross because other people did not get up as early as he did. He was also annoyed that he had to stop playing golf when it got dark.

The solutions to these outbursts of petulance were simple. Someone should have said to Mr Willett: ‘First, leave other people alone. Property developing may not be as tiring as the jobs other people do and they may need more sleep than you. Second, start your game of golf a bit earlier.’

But Mr Willett, like so many other

pestilent reformers, wanted to boss other people about. They were to be compelled to get up earlier and stay up later. Parliament repeatedly turned down the plan.

And then, during the First World War, the supposedly efficient Germans adopted the idea, claiming it would sharpen up their war economy. As it happened, they went on to lose the war. But wars, like all crises, are wonderful opportunities for cranks and fanatics, since everyone is looking for miracle solutions. MPs switched off their brains and said ‘If they’re doing it, so must we’, and we have been stuck with it ever since.

An even madder plan, to set all our clocks permanently to Berlin time, narrowly failed a few years ago, thanks largely to the efforts of this newspaper. If it had succeeded, we would have spent a quarter of the year having breakfast in the dark. The idea is always spread that only Scotland suffers from these changes, but actually they harm everyone, and they are much hated as far south as Spain, where General Franco pushed the clocks forward to please Hitler back in the 1940s.

Now, the European Union, which has ruled our time since 2001, plans to give up doing so. Whether or not we leave the EU, we will soon be free to set our own clocks as we wish. We can at last go back to Greenwich Mean Time, real, organic, British time, the whole year round.

But no, the clock-abusers are on the march again. A campaign is under way to fix our clocks at an hour ahead of GMT, summer and winter. Why? We did this from 1968 to 1971 and it was so widely hated that MPs voted overwhelmingly to bring it to an end. There is no evidence that it will do the slightest good. Claims of fuel savings and accident reductions are, to put it mildly, thin. The idea that the later sunset will stimulate everyone to go out and play tennis or run marathons is a nonsense. Most people will sit at home or in pubs, watching TV and looking at their phones, as they do now. It will just be harder to get children to go to bed.

Yet so-called Permanent Summer Time has lots of support among media types and politicians. And I will tell you why. Most such people never see the dawn. They have no idea whether it is light or dark before about 10 in the morning, or that this changes with the seasons. So they want to steal your morning daylight from you, and stick it on the ends of their evenings, so that they can watch Newsnight while it is still light outside.

Don’t let them do it.