Descent into Darkness

This weekend, the United Kingdom puts its clocks back to move from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time.  Many people are looking forward to an extra hour in bed on Saturday night/Sunday morning.  I must confess that I have never understood this view myself.  Don’t get me wrong, I like nothing more than a good night’s sleep.  But in my view, the trade off is losing one hour of afternoon daylight for five months of the year in return for one extra hour in bed for one night of the year.  This is like someone saying ‘I’ll give you £10 now if you give me £20 a month for the next five months.’

I was on a train back from Manchester this evening.  I exited Huddersfield train station at what turned out to be 6.00pm, emerging into the early evening darkness.  I turned round to check the time on the station clock.  It said it was 5.00pm.  And then I realised that the station had changed its clock early and that from Sunday, it would be that dark at 5.00pm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11642878

http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html

Rather than reiterate in detail the health and energy benefits of moving to Central European Time, I have provided two links which make the case for moving to CET (GMT+1 in the winter and GMT+2 in the summer- time zone of much of the European Union).  Considering the pressing need to lower our energy usage and take more exercise, it seems very logical to revisit this issue.

There are obvious drawbacks to moving Britain’s clocks to Central European Time.  On the shortest day of the year, sunrise would not occur until around 9.20am in Leeds and 9.45am in Glasgow.  This would be a shock to the system.  It would mean that children go to school in dark for part of the year.  However, the crucial point is that there would be an estimated 100 fewer road deaths per year if Britain moved to Central European Time.  The increase in road accidents in the morning would be more than outweighed by a decrease in road accidents in the evenings.  This is precisely what happened when Britain used Central European Time between 1968 to 1971.  However, the results of the trial were not properly analysed and it was abandoned after the House of Commons heard emotionally-charged anecdotes from Scottish MPs children getting knocked down in the morning darkness.  The fact that much fewer children were involved in road accidents in the evening (even in Scotland) was completely ignored.

I can see both sides of the time zone argument.  But I think that the issue is worthy of revisiting.  On December 3rd, MP Rebecca Harris will put a Private Member’s Bill before the Commons which asks the government to review the benefits and drawbacks of moving to Central European Time and then to proceed to move to CET on a trial basis only.  This seems like a very sensible proposal to me.

In my view, the arguments of many people who refuse to consider the idea of a time zone change are based more on emotion than logic and reason.  Some people say that we ‘should’ be on GMT given our longitude.  It is true that time zones are loosely based upon longitude, but are there to be manipulated in order to ensure that natural light is used as efficiently as possibly.  France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain all use Central European Time, even though Geography suggest that GMT would be a more appropriate time zone; France and Belgium used to be in the same time zone as us, but moved one hour ahead after being subjugated by Germany in World War II.  During the war, Britain also went onto what is now Central European Time to make the most of natural daylight.  But whereas France and Belgium stayed with Central European Time after the war, Britain went back to GMT.  After all, what’s the point of winning a war only to adopt the time zone of your enemy?

As a nation, we revisit the GMT vs CET issue every year at this time.  The facts are clearly in favour of at least a trial of Central European Time.  At a time when the government are taking a sledgehammer to public services and many people’s jobs are at risk, you might ask why I choose to write a blog post about this issue.  I have done so because putting the clocks back has an impact on people’s lives. It would be nice to be able to come home from work and go outside again in the daylight.  People would go out more, take more exercise and be less fearful of crime.  There would be fewer accidents on the roads.  And it would save money and help to combat climate change if we could put the lights and heating on one hour later.

Putting the clocks back means that we will temporarily have more morning daylight, but people don’t use as much energy in the morning as they do in the evening.  There are those who say that people who want more daylight should just change their work patterns and get up earlier.  But not everyone has the luxury of flexitime at work.  These days, people generally get up later and go to bed later.  Very few people get up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows at 4am and blow out the bedroom candles at 9pm.  Some people, specifically farmers, still live like this.  But most people do not.  And while I understand why farmers in the Hebrides are against a time zone change, the fact is that the majority of people in the United Kingdom do not live in northern Scotland (Jeremy Bentham anyone?)  In a nutshell, our hours of daylight are out of sync with the hours we keep in ourselves.  It would be much easier to move our clocks an hour forward than to change the time at which we do everything.

As I said, I can see why some people want to keep to Greenwich Mean Time in winter.  This is why I support the idea of a trial and a review of using Central European Time.  I hope that logic and reason will eventually have an impact on people’s thinking on this issue.

Now, if you will excuse me, I must get to bed.  I have to be up at 3.30am to go and get water from the well.

The Free-Market Gone Mad

The world of football has been very eventful indeed this week. A few days ago, Wayne Rooney looked set to walk out on Manchester United. Cue a emotional, but very skillful, piece of PR by Sir Alex Ferguson at his pre-Champions League game press conference on Tuesday. Sir Alex used the world’s media to great effect in putting the onus back on Rooney and questioning his reasons for wanting to leave Manchester United. The following day, Rooney retaliated with a statement, expressing his concerns about Manchester United’s ability to attract the best footballers in the world. The stage looked set for an exit to Eastlands or Stamford Bridge. But on Friday, the drama took another massive twist, as Rooney signed a new five-year deal reportedly worth around £250,000 a week. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Rooney’s book and become embarrassingly incompetent in my job for a few months, then ask for a pay raise.

Money has always been a malicious influence in football, but the events of this week brought it home for all to see. Manchester City were allegedly lining up an £85m bid for Rooney and were set to offer him wages of £288,000 a week. All this while Portsmouth were hovering dangerously close to administration.

I reflected on the events of the last week and thought myself ‘When is this all going to end?’ Foreign owners bankrolling teams and trying to buy silverware. Players on ridiculous wages. This issue was raised on last week’s Question Time. There was a lady in the audience wearing a Chelsea scarf, as you do when you go a political debate, saying that she had no complaints with foreign ownership of teams and believed it was a good thing. It may be a good thing for supporters of Manchester City and Chelsea, but the way in which foreign owners try to buy silverware is not a good thing for football at all.
Astronomical spending creates inflation, with players valued far above their actual worth. This inflation prices the majority of teams out of the market.

In my view, UEFA should impose spending limits to restrict how much money clubs can spend during the transfer window. There should also be tighter restrictions on players wages, so that we are not treated to the spectacle of players like Wayne Rooney, Yaya Touré, inter alia, on obscene wages while other clubs go to the wall. There are some that will argue that UEFA has no jurisdiction to interview in the free-market economy of football. But I would argue that supranational bodies have the responsibility to ensure that the football economy remains competitive and open to all.

The Spending Review- beware of TINA

After reading the details of George Osbourne’s Comprehensive Spending Review and watching highlights of his performance in the Commons, I started to feel the hand of TINA on my shoulder. We haven’t seen TINA around for a while. She was good friends with Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s and was referred to in many of the former prime minister’s speeches. Fast forward to 2010 and I find myself very worried that TINA is being used to justify punitive cuts.  According to George Osborne, There Is No Alternative.  We must support the coalition’s economic policies, or we will end up like Greece.  Or even worse, Manchester United.

It all sounds very sensible, prima facie. The nation has a debt of around £150bn. Therefore, we should spend less and try and eliminate the deficit. The major flaw in this is the rate at which deficit reduction is planned. The key question is whether you can justify taking a sledgehammer to public services in order to reduce the amount of interest that the nation pays on its debt. While MORI polls have shown that the public broadly agree with the thinking behind Coalition’s deficit reduction plan, it will be interesting to see how such views hold up once families up and down the land begin to the feel the pain. Mrs Thatcher was fond of framing her economic policies as ‘kitchen-table economics’ and Osborne is largely doing the same. But can you think of a financially-troubled family who would turn to their kids and say ‘no packed lunch for you today, we’ve got to pay off the mortgage.  If you get hungry, just drink some water and remember that we’re all in this together’.

There can be no doubt that Conservative policy is driven by dogma.  The Tories get to indulge their ideological fantasies while apparently taking the moral high ground.  Labour must exploit the Tories’ lack of a growth strategy.  Osborne is betting everything on leaving the Bank of England and the free-market to take care of growth while he focuses on deficit reduction.

The spending review gave us all plenty to worry about.  We must not be conned into accepting that eliminating the structural deficit in five years in necessary.  Osborne is taking a huge economic gamble with our public services and the welfare state, two central pillars of our society.

It is certainly going to hurt.  But it might not work.