Mr. Ellwood: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform if he will review the dates on which daylight saving commences and finishes to fall more equally either side of the winter solstice.Translation: There is bugger all we can do about it.... sorry.
Mr. McFadden: The start and end dates of summer time are harmonised across EC member states through a European Directive. The Directive stipulates that, in each member state, clocks are put forward annually by one hour for the period between the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October.
There are no plans to change the summer time arrangements at this time.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
EUphemisms?
So I stole the title from Private Eye... sue me!
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12 comments:
For God's sake Dizzy! Please keep your voice down.
At least we're still allowed to operate on GMT and GMT+1 in the Summer. If you start making waves, we'll be on Frog/Kraut time before you can say knife.
And by the way, don't, whatever you do, say "knife", or you'll find yourself banged up for 42 days or more.
I wonder if we can simply accelerate this inevitable process? Cut to the chase as it were.
Like make the Houses of Parliament a fee paying museum piece, with a monthly changing of the PM, Blackrod to scare the punters and piped muzak. Good for tourism you know.
And then on TV, instead of The Westminster Hour we would have The Brussels Hour. People like Mrs Marr and Nick Robinson would relocate to Belgium, the Scottish Question would, at last, have a answer and peace would prevail over the New Republic.
Think of the amount of money we would save by not having the intermediate national parliament. And oh yeah, local councils need no longer be elected, they would simply be outposts of the Brussels Machine dispensing the New Paradigm.
Certainly a Brave New World beckons.
Which is a good idea actually - meaning clocks are not out-of-sync with the rest of Europe by 1 hour sometimes, 2 hours sometimes, and not at all sometimes, as was the case a decade or so ago. Now if the EU were to agree USA-style changes to daylight savings time that would be a good thing... Maybe something that McFadden can argue for with ministerial counterparts from across the EU.
Dizzy, off topic: there are things that your web site sends me that upset Firefox, causing it to grab as much as 4 times as much memory as normal (up to 100M instead of its normal 23M - its over 60M as I write this) and use oodles of CPU time. Stopping your auto-run video drops the CPU usage from around 50% to 25%, and after a while it sometimes settles down to rather less, but not always (its quite low at the moment 'cos the More than Dods banner seems to have stopped moving - oh no: Dods has moved again and CPU is 60% busy for a while). Give us a break, please. (This is on an XP system with 768MB RAM and 2GHz 2800+ Sempron CPU.)
So when did British Summer Time (BST) disappear?
I wonder how long it will be before they move the Greenwich meridean over to Brussels.
I don't have control over the autrun stuff. hwoever, that is a plugin issue anyway and the way it handles memory usage.
I would be very happy with Kraut time and the resulting much longer evenings.
(Oh and fewer road deaths too apparently...)
Why doesn't the UK switch totally to CET thereby helping business people to contact their European partners all day... and more importantly giving the British people longer daylight hours when they get home in the evening, why stay in bed when it is light and live in the dark?
There's nothing in the Directive on which time zone a country chooses to be in. But whichever zone they are in the clocks do have to go back and forward on the same dates in all EU countries. It really is quite sensible.
Lines of Longitude?
Let us not forget that having many time zones within a country, and being in differing time zones from your major trading partners, are major reasons why the US and Japan are such poor and backward countries.
See http://www.worldtimezone.com/ where the detours from the Lines of Longitude are quite a laugh.
(Dizzy: With the vids stopped, Firefox's resource usage on my system is jumping around between 19% and 44% of CPU resource now that the Dods banner has gone, 2 to 15% with your tab deleted but 8 others displayed. I'm about to delete you again...)
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