Does Messing Around with Clocks Mess Around With Our Health?

This website claims it does. Comments are welcome

 

 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/03/04/health-effects-daylight-savings-time.aspx

 

 

Now Spain Considers Rebellion Against Berlin Time

Smug persons who lecture me about how time zones don’t matter (and then infest the comment threads with incessant arguments about the subject they say doesn’t interest them) might have been discombobulated by a report and leading article in the Times today (both, alas, behind a pay wall) in which it was disclosed that Spain is thinking of returning to Greenwich Time, instead of following the distant Berlin meridian which it adopted in obeisance to Franco’s ally Hitler, in 1942.

A map of Western Europe’s time zones illustrates just how political Berlin time is. Only the British isles and Portugal decline to follow the Berlin time decree. But about 90% of Spain and about 35% of France are to the West of Greenwich, and Greenwich time would suit all of France better than the zone in which it is compelled to be.. If Spain should be on Berlin time, then so should Turkey and Ukraine, which are equally far away in the opposite direction. But they are not.  It would be an absurdity which an independent country would not tolerate. Even Greece,  Romania and Bulgaria are excused, for the moment (presumably they are thought to have suffered enough for their EU membership). Portugal some years ago broke away from Berlin Time because it simply didn’t fit the real time in that country. Apart from all the usual problems – going to school or work in the dark, children saying up late into the night, no measurable savings in energy, people just didn’t like it once it was imposed . This is always the problem with the time maniacs. As almost nobody understands the moving of the clocks, and the most confused are often those who think they do, most people will accept it in theory and then have several years to discover they have made a mistake in practice.

Look back over past debates here and see how many people say they perfectly well understand that changing the clocks doesn’t increase the amount of daylight. Then see how rapidly the same people will come up with further arguments predicated on the idea that it *does* alter the amount of daylight, that length of the evening etc.

Weird. But true

Now Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is thinking of doing the same , as part of  a proposed general revolution in Spanish working and living habits.

Two things are established by this event. One is that time zones are deeply political, as political as language and borders,  and my contention that Berlin Time is a consequence of EU centralisation is not, as my smug, ill-informed critics jeer, absurd -  but pretty much indisputable. Spain’s adherence to Berlin Time is an acknowledged  result of the Franco regime’s desire to be on good terms with Hitler.

 

The whole global system of time followed a diplomatic struggle between Britain and France for mastery of the meridian, resolved in Britain’s favour at the International Meridian Conference of October 1884. France sulked about this result for a quarter of a century, refusing to adopt the Greenwich meridian till 1911.  And people do care about the measurement of time. I’m only surprised more people don’t admit to being interested by this subject. But almost every intervention I’ve ever made about it has been provoked by other people wanting to mess about with time, not by me.

A discussion on British Summer TIme at the IEA

A kind member of the audience has sent me this audio recording of a debate in which I took part, on the weird habit of shifting the clocks. 

 

You may listen to it here

 

https://soundcloud.com/hshah-2/iea-discussion-rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light-peter-hitchens-and-christopher-snowdon

Time After Time - A debate on making the clocks lie - why does the government do it?

 

My old opponent, Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs, has had the clever idea of suggesting a debate on the issue, many times discussed here, of messing around with the clocks twice a year. It'll be in London on 30th March, details here.

 

http://www.iea.org.uk/events/discussion-rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light

Darker Later - the Tyranny of 'Daylight Saving' Examined

Once again we are on the eve of the mad annual ritual of the clocks. Tomorrow morning, all official time sources from Big Ben to the BBC will be lying about the time, and if you have any sense, all the myriad clocks in your home will be lying too. They will say  that it is 9.00 a.m. when it is in fact 8.00.

 

Churches, shops cafes, railways, buses, TV stations and everyone else will join in the mass deception. You can stand aside if you like, but unless your life is totally private, you will (at the very least) inconvenience yourself.

If you are,  like me, a habitual early riser who has been enjoying the steadily increasing amount of light in the early morning, the change will be an annoying nuisance.  It was fully light around six. Now you will have to wait till seven o’clock for the same amount of light. More likely, you will wake naturally when you normally do, and find that it is physically impossible to catch the train you have been getting regularly for months . Or, by the use of hideous jarring alarms, the nastiest way of waking up outside actual captivity,  you will cudgel your brain and body into rising earlier each day, with the inevitable groggy and unpleasant results, not unlike jetlag.

 

At the other end of the day, the equally enjoyable slow and dusky advance of afternoon into evening will suddenly be violently accelerated. A change that would once have involved weeks of patient acclimatisation will be accomplished in a day,  a disorienting experience for anyone remotely sensitive to his surroundings.

 

What’s it for? Nobody really knows. All sorts of claims are made for it – the most absurd being that it increases the amount of daylight, which cannot be true. It increases the amount of daylight only for late sleepers (politicians are often in this class, and journalists) who have seldom seen the dawn and didn’t like it the last time they did see it.  These people wasted hours of light in the morning. Now, one of those hours has been transferred to the evening, so they can, allegedly, play tennis or otherwise romp around in the extra daylight.

 

They won’t, of course, they’ll go to the pub, or watch the TV, oblivious of what is going on outside anyway.  

 

The rest of us, struggling to get children to go to bed when it is still light, will silently curse them.

 

And we will be told it’s good for the economy, or saves fuel, or increases tourism, or some such excuse. Is there has there ever been, any hard evidence for this?

It was not alluded to during the very few short debates when Parliament agreed to begin this ritual, originally in May 1916 (it first happened by law on the 20^th of that month, the first and second readings of the Act having been taken by the House of Lords on the 16th)  and in a tearing hurry, under the usual catch-all excuse that we were at war and therefore must do everything to become more efficient, etc . Opposition was unpatriotic.  The idea had originally been encouraged by a miserable building tycoon called William Willett, and a bug-hunter from New Zealand, George Hudson. Mr Willett was cross that other people stayed in bed on summer mornings while he was out riding his horse, and thought they ought to be made to get up. He was also annoyed because he had to stop playing golf earlier in the evening than he wanted to, because it was too dark to see to play. Mr Hudson, thanks to working shifts, found he had lots of time to hunt insects when most people would have been at work, and was filled with a passion to spread the benefit to others. wanted more time to hunt insects.

 

There are obvious alternative solutions to both these problems – one, let other people live the way they want to, and two, start your golf game earlier.  As for Mr Hudson, he needed to understand that not all of us are the same.

 

The idea, a bit like the man-made global warming cult, is fanatical and dictatorial. We are all to be made to live differently, for our own good, even if the evidence that it *is* for our own good is sparse and open to contest.

 

Introducing the measure on 16^th May 1916, the Marquess of Lansdowne (later to be famous for a noble but doomed attempt to end the Great War in a negotiated settlement), said :

 

‘‘It has often been said that if in this country any one were able at five o'clock on a summer's morning to lift the roofs off the houses he would see that, in spite of bright daylight, the greater part of the population was sound asleep with closed shutters; that if, again, he were able to perform a similar operation at ten o'clock in the evening, he would find a great part of the population using artificial light in order to make up for their own mismanagement earlier in the day. The object of this Bill is to introduce a small measure of additional Common sense into these arrangements.’

 

it is a measure which conduces to efficiency and economy, and there can, I think, be no doubt whatever that this Bill will have those results. Our proposal is that in the five summer months we should push on the clock by one hour, and thereby encourage people to begin the day and the night earlier than they have hitherto been in the habit of doing. The arguments in favour of the proposal seem to me fairly obvious. It is, of course, the case that the hours of daylight are limited, and it seems to follow that it is our duty to turn them to the best account that we can. I understand that the result of this Bill will be that during the summer months 130 additional hours of daylight will be available in consequence of it.

 

I will not take upon myself to name to the House the sum which it is believed will be saved to the country by this change in the law. The estimates must obviously be very conjectural. I have seen it placed as high as £10,000,000 a year, but I should be sorry to assume any responsibility for that or any other figure. It is quite clear, however, that if we can get people to consume sunlight instead of electric light and lamp light, the national bill for illuminants must be reduced to a material extent. ‘

 

Not a fact in sight, you see (the estimates of fuel saved are ’conjectural’, a grandiose way of saying ‘guesswork’) , and the barmy claim of 130 additional hours of daylight is made.

 

Lord Balfour of Burleigh offered some opposition: ‘I know quite well that it is hopeless now to oppose the Bill. I congratulate myself that at any rate it is ostensibly a Bill only for the duration of the war, and that the chief reason put forward on its behalf is that there will be a certain economy and saving of light and of coal during a portion of the year. I sincerely hope that it will be recognised on all sides that it is put forward as a temporary war measure, and that if we do not oppose it strenuously on this occasion it is because we trust that before it becomes a permanent institution of the country a real opportunity will be given of considering it. In my humble opinion I prophesy—we will see whether my prophesy comes true—that it will be a very serious burden on the, in the Parliamentary sense, least articulate portion of the population. I believe it will do an immense amount of injury to the women of the working classes. They will have to get up an hour earlier in the morning than they do at the present time, and although the clock will decree the ordinary hour of going to bed when it comes to evening I believe that the children for whom they are responsible and the male population will be sitting up later owing to the length of daylight, and that they will have their period of rest curtailed. I think this is very hard upon the women of the working classes, and I believe this will be one of the evil effects of the Bill. And I do not myself for a moment believe that children will go to bed before daylight ends; they, too, will be deprived of a certain part of their rest.’

 

So did many Lords speaking for the (then) powerful agricultural interest, pointing out that farming proceeds according to the sun and not the clock, and that much work cannot begin until the sun has burned the dew off the fields.

 

When it came up for peacetime renewal in 1922, One MP noted:

‘ The Board of Education was evidently doubtful as to the effect of this Measure on the children of the country, and they issued instructions that inquiries should be made among local education authorities as to their opinions upon it. In the White Paper which has been issued as the result of that, it is stated that reference was made to 299 authorities, of which only 183 were in favour, while 27 were uncertain. One of the chief reasons for objection is indicated in the White Paper: It is said there that this would not have been so damaging to the children of the country had it not been that parental control was lacking and that the children could not be induced to go to bed. 

 

 

‘In an Appendix to the White Paper it is stated that an instruction was issued on the matter to parents of school children it is called, "A Message to Parents," and it states, "Many children have been found of late not to do justice to their lessons because they have had too little sleep." This is in consequence of Summer Time, and in consequence of tinkering with the sun. The children consequently stay up an hour later and get an hour's sleep less. Surely the consideration of the children's health and the consideration of agriculture being a very serious business to the country, as opposed to the pleasure which is really what the Bill seeks to encourage—surely these matters are so important that it would be better for the Government to drop the Bill altogether.’

 

I have not been able to trace the White Paper that is mentioned here, and would be glad if anyone can identify it and tell me where I might find it.

 

A Mr Lunn weighed in : ‘Had it not been for the reason that two of my colleagues have spoken in support of this Bill, I should not have desired to speak on this occasion. I know that my own association, the Yorkshire Miners' Association, are unanimously against this Measure, and they have always been opposed to it, because we are satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner or the industrial worker who has to get up in the middle of the night to go to his work. We are also satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner's wife. The wife of a man who has to go to work at such an early hour, and who is the mother of a young family, has perhaps the hardest lot of any class or section of the community.

 

‘There are thousands of miners' wives who have to get up in the middle of the night, and a Bill like this forces them to get up earlier than they would otherwise have to do. Sometimes there is a double shift at the colliery Where the son or the lodger works, and then the wife is kept up waiting for the conclusion of the second shift. If she has any young children they will not go to bed because of this Bill and the longer daylight, and the wife has to get the children to school next morning earlier and get them up. I cannot understand why any representative of an industrial community can support this Bill and I am quite prepared to accept the position taken up on behalf of agriculture. I do not suppose that there is any Agricultural Labourers' Union or any body of agricultural workers who would support this Bill. With regard to the views expressed by the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton), I would like to point out that be is a bachelor whilst most of the Members of the Labour party are married men. I hope this Bill does not get a Second Reading. Those who support this Bill are in a minority, and they are not the most useful section of the community. After everything has been said, the people who do the hard work and who have built up this nation ought to be considered and so ought their wives and families. For these reasons I take the view that we ought to reject this Bill.’

 

And Mr Macquisten said : ‘I fully agree with the remark made by the last speaker, that this is one of the most absurd Measures that was ever passed. It has now been passed by this House every year since 1916. It was passed during the period of the War, when. according to the suggestion made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury), we were all mad. I do not know why he should place to that a limitation of time. This Bill is an absurd proposition on the face of it. What is the good of telling lies about the time? It amounts to that? It enacts by Act of Parliament a lie, and it states that that is the time which is not the time, and it is perfectly absurd. There are about 45,000,000 inhabitants in this country, and, therefore, you can take it that there are 7,000,000 households containing at least 7,000,000 clocks. Every one of those clocks has a face, and you cannot expect to train the rising generation in veracity if they have facing them every morning a gross misstatement of fact.’

 

During the Second World War, Double Summer Time was imposed, again on the unanswerable claim that it would help win the war (I cannot find any debate on this) . Did it? Does anyone know? It seems unlikely given these highly unusual exact figures supplied to the House of Commons on 4th March 1947 by Chuter Ede, then Home Secretary. Mr Ede was seeking to bring back Double Summer Time in peacetime because of a national fuel crisis:

 

He said:

‘… in some urban centres double summer time was welcomed during the war period. But, in agricultural areas it was always resented, and even in urban areas a large number of people thought double summer time had a detrimental effect on the health of children,

 

‘I was very careful in the statement I made not to emphasise the amount of fuel that will actually be saved by this arrangement, for the saving of fuel is so small in its absolute figures as to be fairly negligible. The best estimate I can give is that there will be a saving of some 120,000 tons of coal in respect of the generating stations, and 10,000 tons in respect of gas and domestic supplies, as far as the additional period of single summer time is concerned. The period of double summer time which we propose will enable an additional saving to be made of some 20,000 tons, making a total of 150,000 tons in all. It is therefore quite clear that if it were merely a question of the absolute saving of fuel, it would not be right to introduce this Bill. What I was very careful to point out was that the enactment of this Measure would enable us to make more effective use of the fuel which is available, and that is the ground on which I must rest my case.

 

‘I can assure the House that as far as my own personal predilections are concerned, I would be the last person to want to introduce summer time at all. 

 

Tom Driberg, that old rogue, spoke for grammar school pupils in his Essex seat:

 

‘This Measure is also rather unfortunate in its effect on schoolchildren. With the increasing tendency to urbanise rural schools, which I deplore—the tendency to transport children daily long distances to and from their schools in the nearest town—the question of summer time becomes a serious consideration. I had occasion recently to draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education to the case of a dozen or two children in my own constituency who attend a grammar school some 15 miles away, and who now have to leave their homes by 6.30 each morning in order to be at school by 9 o'clock. Under double summer time, they will have to leave their homes at what would normally be 4.30 each morning, and still be away for 12 hours daily.’

 

And Sir Alan Herbert, the lawyer and wit who then occupied one of Oxford University’ s two seats   and so gloried in the title of ‘Junior Burgess’ (abolished a year later when we finally introduced universal suffrage democracy, one man, one vote, no more), made the first reference I can find to ‘Berlin Time’,  the ‘reform’ repeatedly proposed by persons who claim it has nothing to do with an attempt to impose a universal EU time, but can never explain why this nightmarish departure from nature (tried and swiftly rejected by the people of Portugal) is justified in any other way:  

 

‘I hate to think that Big Ben, that great bell which has been such a voice in the councils of the world, will be heard booming, through the B.B.C., all around the world, for half the summer, Berlin time, and for the rest of the summer, Moscow time. I do not need to inform hon. Members that Berlin lies in longitude 15 degrees East, and that Moscow is in longitude 3o degrees East—rather more—and that if we advance the clock one hour, we shall use Berlin time, and if we advance it two hours, Moscow time.

 

‘I think that summer time, single or double, is the most frightful confession of weakness of which the human race has ever been guilty. By all means let us change our habits according to the seasons. Even the dumb animals do that. Even the uneducated cock does not crow at the same time all the year round. But let us change our habits without necessarily changing the clocks. I do not see why it is not possible for us to get up one hour earlier because it is good for us, because it is good for trade, or even because it is good for the country, but it is possible if we are deceived by a silly mechanical trick with the clock. That is an idea which must be repugnant surely to anybody who has the smallest respect for the human race. Surely, in the normal times to which the Home Secretary referred—I do not say now—especially when the Government either run or control so many things, it should be the simplest thing in the world for the Government to say that, from a certain date, all Government offices would begin work one hour earlier, and it was hoped that industry would follow suit.’

 

Well, that era passed and we went back to the moderate craziness of Single Summer Time, which we have stuck to ever since, out of inertia rather than reason. I am sure that those who would make an effort to impose decimal coinage or metric measurements, and applaud it, in the name of progress, would likewise oppose any attempt to restore our clocks to the truth, and truth to our clocks. Anything which disorients and uproots is progress. Anything which reassures and is particular and customary, is condemned.

Forget 'evil' Putin: we're the bloodthirsty warmongers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

This is a time of year for memories, and the ones that keep bothering me are from my childhood, which seemed at the time to be wholly happy and untroubled.

Yet all the adults in my life still dwelt in the shadow of recent war. This was not the glamorous, exciting side of war, but the miserable, fearful and hungry aspect.

My mother, even in middle-class suburban prosperity, couldn’t throw away an eggshell without running her finger round it to get out the last of the white. No butcher dared twice to try to cheat her on the weights.

Haunted all her life by rationing, she would habitually break a chocolate bar into its smallest pieces. She had also been bombed from the air in Liverpool, and had developed a fatalism to cope with the nightly danger of being blown to pieces, shocking to me then and since.

I am now beset by these ingrained memories of shortage and danger because I seem surrounded by people who think that war might be fun. This seems to happen when wartime generations are pushed aside by their children, who need to learn the truth all over again.

It seemed fairly clear to me from her experiences that war had in fact been a miserable affair of fear, hunger, threadbare darned clothes, broken windows and insolent officials. And that was a victory, more or less, though my father (who fought in it) was never sure of that.

Now I seem surrounded by people who actively want a war with Russia, a war we all might lose. They seem to believe that we are living in a real life Lord Of The Rings, in which Moscow is Mordor and Vladimir Putin is Sauron. Some humorous artists in Moscow, who have noticed this, have actually tried to set up a giant Eye of Sauron on a Moscow tower.

We think we are the heroes, setting out with brave hearts to confront the Dark Lord, and free the saintly Ukrainians from his wicked grasp.

This is all the most utter garbage. Since 1989, Moscow, the supposed aggressor, has – without fighting or losing a war – peacefully ceded control over roughly 180 million people, and roughly 700,000 square miles of valuable territory.

The EU (and its military wing, Nato) have in the same period gained control over more than 120 million of those people, and almost 400,000 of those square miles.

Until a year ago, Ukraine remained non-aligned between the two great European powers. But the EU wanted its land, its 48 million people (such a reservoir of cheap labour!) its Black Sea coast, its coal and its wheat.

So first, it spent £300 million (some of it yours) on anti-Russian ‘civil society’ groups in Ukraine.

Then EU and Nato politicians broke all the rules of diplomacy and descended on Kiev to take sides with demonstrators who demanded that Ukraine align itself with the EU.

Imagine how you’d feel if Russian politicians had appeared in Edinburgh in September urging the Scots to vote for independence, or if Russian money had been used to fund pro-independence organisations.

Then a violent crowd (20 police officers died at its hands, according to the UN) drove the elected president from office, in violation of the Ukrainian constitution.

During all this process, Ukraine remained what it had been from the start – horrendously corrupt and dominated by shady oligarchs, pretty much like Russia.

If you didn’t want to take sides in this mess, I wouldn’t at all blame you. But most people seem to be doing so.

There seems to be a genuine appetite for confrontation in Washington, Brussels, London… and Saudi Arabia.

There is a complacent joy abroad about the collapse of the rouble, brought about by the mysterious fall in the world’s oil price.

It’s odd to gloat about this strange development, which is also destroying jobs and business in this country. Why are the Gulf oil states not acting – as they easily could and normally would – to prop up the price of the product that makes them rich?

I do not know, but there’s no doubt that Mr Putin’s Russia has been a major obstacle to the Gulf states’ desire to destroy the Assad government in Syria, and that the USA and Britain have (for reasons I long to know) taken the Gulf’s side in this.

But do we have any idea what we are doing? Ordinary Russians are pretty stoical and have endured horrors unimaginable to most of us, including a currency collapse in 1998 that ruined millions. But until this week they had some hope.

If anyone really is trying to punish the Russian people for being patriotic, by debauching the rouble, I cannot imagine anything more irresponsible. It was the destruction of the German mark in 1922, and the wipeout of the middle class that resulted, which led directly to Hitler.

Stupid, ill-informed people nowadays like to compare Mr Putin with Hitler. I warn them and you that, if we succeed in overthrowing Mr Putin by unleashing hyper-inflation in Russia, we may find out what a Russian Hitler is really like. And that a war in Europe is anything but fun.

So, as it’s almost Christmas, let us sing with some attention that bleakest and yet loveliest of carols, It Came Upon The Midnight Clear, stressing the lines that run ‘Man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring. Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing’.

Or gloat at your peril over the scenes of panic in Moscow.

How does Theresa May get away with it? She sits for months on a report which exposes her department as a slovenly shambles. It shows that 220,000 files on immigrants who should have been deported were found rotting in boxes in back rooms and even in a lift shaft. The people involved aren’t (of course) being deported. But it gets one tenth of the coverage of the latest Ukip mini-scandal.

Does anyone really think that merging small police forces into big ones in 1967 made the police better? Absolutely not. It was then that they stopped foot patrols. So ignore calls for even bigger forces. Small is best, as lucky Americans know.

If the campaign for Berlin Time had got its way (and it very nearly did), sunrise in southern England this morning would be after 9am. How can this possibly be a good idea?

At Woolwich, in Ottawa and now in Sydney, deranged maniacs kill, in most cases while out of their minds on the drugs we have given up trying to control. Deluded by propaganda, we classify this as ‘terrorism’.

The streets are flooded with troops and robocops, helicopters clatter overhead and blowhard ‘experts’ drone portentously about how these are ‘lone wolves’, as if that solved the matter.

Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

(Some) Answers to (some) Correspondents

Just a few points (alas I can’t deal with everything) in response to comments. Mr ‘P’ makes the standard mistake of the ‘anti-appeasement’ faction, by assuming that the very odd and illogical course of events between March and September 1939 was fore-ordained, and would have happened even if Lord Halifax hadn’t pressed for the mad guarantee to Poland, which allowed that country to take complete control of Britain's foreign and defence policies.

 

By the way, I don’t think the hindsight-tinged reminiscences of defeated German generals at Nuremberg give much of a guide as to how Germany would have behaved if opposed in 1938 . Czechoslovakia’s position after the Anschluss was militarily indefensible, as the annexation of Austria had made the Erzegebirge fortifications irrelevant (look at a map).

 

Britain and France were in no position to take any significant action in support of Prague.

 

The whole point is that, without the Polish guarantee, Poland, Germany and the USSR would all have behaved very differently. I should say it is virtually certain that Poland would have conceded German demands over Danzig and the corridor, and renewed her 1934 non-aggression pact with Germany. There would have been no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, no autumn war, no Blitzkrieg, no May 1940 invasion of the West. I suspect Hitler would have turned his attentions towards Romania (for its oil) and Yugoslavia (for its long-term strategic value in a future attack on the USSR) . This would also have postponed the Holocaust, which did not begin until the invasion of the USSR. While Germany was still at peace with western Europe, Jews in Germany were certainly horribly persecuted, and individually beaten up and killed. But Jews, especially children, were still being allowed to leave the country, and there was no official policy of mass-murder, as there was after the Wannsee conference of early 1942 (though of course deliberate massacres had taken place during the invasion of Russia and the Baltic states) .

 

He also doesn’t seem to see that Britain (and France) would never have been in danger of disadvantageous peace  negotiations with Hitler if they hadn’t declared war on Germany in the first place. The country which declares war and then sues for peace can expect to be humiliated, robbed and stripped by its conqueror, who will naturally ensure that his former foe cannot easily threaten him again.

 

In fact, by declaring war from a position of weakness (as we did)  we gravely endangered our navy, our air force and our gold reserves, all of which Hitler would have demanded had we sued for peace.  He would have taken some parts of our empire, too. (the irony is that it was our allies, the USA, who ended up taking our gold and forcing us to give up our empire and scrap most of our navy).

 

As for the balance of power, had this been our real objective, the only serious step we could have taken would have been the one we eventually adopted far later and in much worse circumstances – an alliance of necessity with Stalin, paid for by giving Stalin a free hand in the Baltics and Eastern Europe (though less free than the one we gave him at Yalta).

 

We wouldn’t do that  because we thought Stalin was horrid (though we were happy to make a pact with anti-Semitic, undemocratic Poland, which had disreputably seized a bleeding chunk of Czechoslovakia after Munich) , so he wouldn’t agree to a deal. Would sucha  deal in 1939 have been so much worse than going to war with Hitler without an army, being swiftly beaten and driven into the sea while losing billions of pounds worth of equipment by today’s values, going bankrupt and nearly getting ourselves occupied? I can’t see why.

 

But if we weren’t prepared to make such an alliance, I can’t see that making one with the broken reed of Poland was preferable to armed and vigilant neutrality. The second policy was adopted by the USA, which came out of the war richer and more powerful than it went in (in many ways at our expense). And nobody of any moment sneers at the USA for doing so. So why would it have been wrong for us?.

 

There’s no parallel with modern Russia’s reasonable desire to protect its sphere of influence after years of provocation. Anyone who really wanted this country to be independent would welcome a counterweight to the EU on the European continent, I should have thought.

 

I am never sure whether people have had sense of humour failures or are trying to be funny, but my mention of Mr Erdogan’s moustache was, of course, a joke. Evil dictators tend to have these odd facial growths. Need I say more? Perhaps.

 

The point about shoving the clocks forward is one of 'who whom'? Ahd also one of trading standards. I like to get up early and to go to bed early. So that is what I do. I have no desire to impose my habits on anyone else. I adapt to the world as it is. But I resist the attempts of others to impose their different choices on me.

 

By shifting time away a full hour (or more if they could get away with it) from its true natural position, they make it less pleasant and convenient for me to live my life as I wish.

 

Try it this way. If people like me had somehow managed to bamboozle politicians into believing that ‘daylight-saving’ could be achieved by jamming the clocks one (or more ) hours *back* from their true natural position, then those who are now clock-changers would object that they were being forced to endure light mornings they did not want, and dark evenings they disliked.  

 

But here’s the difference. I would side with them. I don’t believe there’s a true majority for this meddling, in either direction. Some would be suited by one, and some by the other. But since time is not arbitrary, but depends on noon coinciding (reasonably closely) with the sun being at its zenith, the default should surely be nature. As I’ve said before, altering any other measure of objective reality to give a false reading would vary between being mad (thermometers and barometers) inconvenient, dangerous  and damaging (speedometers) to being an actual crime (weights and measures) .

 

I am sure it’s only because most people don’t really understand the clock-shifting procedure and its effects (most are clueless about whether the clocks should go forwards or backwards on any given occasion, until they are told by the media) , and naturally assume that authority knows what it is doing (one of outr biggest mistakes), that this crazy performance continues unchallenged.

In the course of arguing against Berlin Time, I at last understood what was actually involved.  And I am completely convinced that shifting the clocks is useless at best, harmless at most.

 

I would note that this morning, when I had an unmissable appointment in London, I got up at my normal time (by the clock) which was 4.45 by GMT. And so, for the first time in many weeks, I got up in pitch darkness. I have felt bleary, tired and jetlagged all day, and I have no doubt this will persist for some days, as it always does. I can see no good reason why this was inflicted on me. If others want more daylight when they’re awake, I suggest they get up earlier. They’ll be amazed at how many establishments from shops to stations to swimming pools are open early already, and perhaps they might campaign for some of them to open earlier, if they think it so important, rather than inflict their wishes on millions of others who are inconvenienced by them.

 

Defenders of abortion try to equate it with miscarriage and still-birth. These are not the consequences of deliberate human acts, and cannot be treated in the same way.

 

My parallel between Crimea and North Cyprus is not intended as a condemnation of Turkey’s behaviour in 1974. As I’ve written here before, I sympathise with Turkey’s action in many ways. Like Moscow, Ankara was provoked.  I’m just saying that those who condemn one must condemn the other. And, as NATO plainly doesn’t do this, its inconsistency reveals that its real hostility to Russian action is not principled, but has another cause.

Not So Simple - Sherlock Holmes, God, Time, Steam and Speed

Well, I think we can all agree that none of the elaborate formulae proposed to work out the speed of the Paddington-Exeter train from the telegraph poles could possibly be described as *simple*. Whereas Watson’s suggestion, that Holmes could have worked it out by counting the quarter-mile posts (dismissed superciliously by the Great Detective) *would* have been simple. I think Holmes is showing off that this cumbersome, messy and time-consuming brainteaser is *simple* for him.

 

Some British railway lines still have quarter-mile posts, though I find that more and more they are being replaced by posts every tenth of a mile, or 176 yards or eight chains, an attempt to decimalise tradition (which actually works in this case, because you can cut a mile into tenths if you really want to). On some stretches, notably just outside Paddington station, the distance to the buffers is confusingly measured by two sets of posts, one in foreign metres and the other in English miles and chains.

 

To my great joy, railways in this country still mark bridges by their distance apart in miles and chains (a chain is the length of a cricket pitch, by the way - 22 yards). I wonder how this has survived the metric fanatics . Note for those who enjoy these things, which I know isn’t everyone - the Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning, in a delightful item about a flood-encircled village in the Somerset levels,  filled me with unexpected joy when not only did they give the depth of the flood in feet, but a farmer talked of delivering ‘several hundredweight’ of sausages. The hundredweight is one of my very favourite customary measurements because it sounds as heavy as it is, and utterly English. I used to hump half-hundredweight bags of barley (56 pounds) when (back in the late 1960s) I did a summer job at the lamented Morrell’s brewery in Oxford, now turned into desirable residences. I also rolled barrels, slung crates, stood for smelly,  hamstring-straining hours at the (half-pint) bottle-washing machine and learned how to skive, and how long you could get away with it before being noticed (earlier work, mainly on farms, had been constantly under the eye of the employer, and so skive-free) . Some of the smaller clubs still took deliveries in Firkins (the measure used in the Authorised Version of the Bible, when it described how much water Jesus transforms into wine at Cana, six waterpots containing two or three firkins apiece, or ‘twenty or thirty gallons’ apiece in modern translations). How long before we have a metric Bible in which we are required to walk two kilometres with a man who asks us to accompany him for one, Noah’s Ark is measured in metres and centimetres, and the miracle of Cana is measured in litres?

 

However you measure it, that’s a lot of wine. Though I believe a wine firkin (the word means a quarter and apparently comes from the Dutch) was different from and perhaps smaller than an ale firkin.

 

 

As for Holmes’s atheism I need slightly to revise that view. He may well have been a Deist, and therfeore a theist, though not, I think, a Christian. I would draw the attention of the reader to this passage from ‘the Sign of Four’ ( Chapter 2) in which Holmes abruptly stalks out, having airily dismissed Watson’s remark that Mary Morstan (Watson's future wife) is a very attractive woman. Holmes declares: ‘I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man". I shall be back in an hour.’

 

 

Reade is mentioned again later in the story. Reade was , if not the Dawkins of his time, rather close to it (and was actually denounced by W.E.Gladstone at one point).  Alert readers of the stories, at the time they were published, would certainly have taken the reference as a sign of a rather aggressive anti-religious position on Holmes’s part.

 

 

Though he was a secularist rather than an actual atheist, Reade was strongly hostile to traditional religion. Those interested in Holmes’s religious opinions would do well to look at a web article by Mr Drew Thomas, ‘Sherlock Holmes on Religion’, which adduces several quotations (including the thoughts on the rose in ‘The  Naval Treaty’) to show that Holmes had some Biblical knowledge, a wide literary knowledge (including of foreign sources) and sometimes contradicted himself.

 

How interesting that this character, invented as an entertainment for weekly magazine readers, should have become such an abiding and interesting figure, though he never lived, that we speculate to this day on what he might really have been like, and would all (I think) wish to sit at a dinner table with him, if he existed, and also fear to do so in case we were humiliated.

 

And yet when Conan Doyle sought to create lasting literature, he failed. It is as if, 100 years from now, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher were to survive in the public mind, while every Booker Prize winner for the past 25 years was utterly forgotten.

 

‘Bert’ , one of our contributors who professes to know all (but who still hasn’t explained what, apart from the EU Landfill directive, lies behind the widespread and accelerating abolition of normal weekly rubbish collections in Britain, though he professes to know that it isn't that) now doubts that the EU decides when our clocks go backwards and forwards. Why does he keep walking into these things without checking?

The details of the directive involved (and its history) are to be found here http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0739:FIN:EN:PDF

 

One small but (to me) highly significant result of this has been that the former British law, which prevented the introduction of Summer Time on Easter Sunday itself out of consideration for churchgoers, has been over-ridden, so that the clocks now quite frequently go forward on Easter Day, making the most important single service of the year awkwardly early for many believers, especially those with young families. I doubt whether a similar inconvenience could or would be imposed by EU directive upon followers of Islam.

 

Bert also opines that he likes the later sunsets brought about by jamming the clocks further forward than real time (which must be and can be defined by the relation between our planet and the Sun). Whereas he notes that people such as me dislike the dark winter mornings which are the inevitable price for this. He seems to think that this means we should compromise with the silly mess we have now. I disagree.

 

Left to me, time would simply stay the same all year round. Since larks and owls will never agree, why not let the planet, and the position in which it stands in relation to the sun, decide the matter impartially?  

 

If ‘Bert’ wants to feel as if he more light at the end of the day, he has an easy remedy which doesn't involvemessing about with anyone else's life. This remedy, as it happens, is not available to those (such as me)  who are compelled to be early-risers.

 

Let him get up earlier in the morning, so ensuring (I promise) that sunset will *feel* later, when it eventually arrives. I, like many people, cannot by contrast get up later, as if I did I wouldn’t get to work on time, and many other important tasks and duties, dependent on the agreed legal time, couldn’t be done. Time may be a human, subjective measure, but it measures a cosmic, objective fact. Noon should coincide, as closely as possible within each nation, with the time at which the Sun is at its zenith. Where nations are too big for this, they should have agreed time zones. Without any such arrangement,  the clocks lie. What other measure of objective reality do we treat in this way?  

 

What would we think of car speedometers which agve a deliberately false reading of speed, petrol pumps which deliebrately falsified the flow of fuel, electricity or water meters, or butcher's scales,  set to give inaccurate readings?  We'd prosecute, most ofthe time. So why is it permissible to set the clocks to a false measure?

 

I am complexly unconvinced by the arguments for clock-switching, a silly faddish nuisance from the age of rational dress, sandals and fruitarianism, which somehow caught on during wartime, but whose alleged benefits seem to me to remain wholly unproven by any careful, unbiased objective study of measurable facts. People such as me have already been forced to undergo absurdly late sunsets in summer, again a great nuisance to parents of young children,  or to people who for any reason need to rise early for work. And I might add that recent work showing how badly shift-work affects the body, seems to me to provide an argument against messing round with body clocks at all, unless strictly necessary during long-distance travel. I suffer from a malaise similar to jetlag for some weeks after the clocks go forward each spring (and by contrast feel an enhanced sense of physical wellbeing when they return to their proper time in October). 

Under a Berlin Moon?

This morning I bicycled to the station by moonlight again.  We long-distance commuters often have to do this sort of thing in the winter months, not seeing our homes in daylight during the week. It is, on my route to work, rather beautiful, with the moon reflected in the floods and casting strong shadows among the leafless trees.

But, if I and others had not prevented the change to Berlin Time (proposed by an outfit that I seem to recall was called the 'Darker Later' campaign), it wouldn't just be long-distance commuters and very early risers who were currently going to work by moonlight (or, more often, in good old pitch darkness).

 

At this time of year, even on clear, sharp days, darkness would still lie over Southern England till nearly 9.00 a.m. You can experience something similar by taking a January trip to Paris, where the blackness of the sky at breakfast time is startling. The French put up with this kind of stuff as part of their deal with Germany, which wins them billions in subsidies, tolerance of a semi-socialist economy of regulation and rigid employment laws, and Germany's happy readienss to humour France's global posturings as a mighty, glorious military and diplomatic power, which it isn't really. The last thing Germany wants is for anyone to notice that the real power in Europe resides in Berlin and Frankfurt. If France wants to pose as a great power, that's just fine. But the century-old German desire for the continent to set its clocks to Central European Time (close to the Berlin meridian) is one of those symbolic acts of obeisance that must be observed. It's a little reminder of the true relationship between Berlin and Paris.   

 

In Madrid, meanwhile, public opinion is moving in favour of dropping Berlin time, as it's so wearing and exhausting to be permanently on the wrong time zone. Let us see how they get on.

 

One of the reasons why the 'Darker Later' campaign, its predecessors and its (wait for it, it can't be long) successors always get such an easy ride in Parlaiment and the British media is because only about one person in 20 understands how time works, or can even remember which way the clocks go in Spring or Autumn. Everyone thinks that messing around with the time will only affect the far north of Scotland. Millions don't even realise that we are compelled, by EU law, to move our clocks forwards one hour on a set date in April, and backwards one hour on a  set date in October, so that compromises such as keeping the clocks on one time all the year round aren't possible.

 

So these poor deluded people are in constant danger of being the victims of a fait accompli, when they discover too late that they must forever trudge to work in the dark on winter mornings, and endure blazing sunshine in late evenings in mid-summer, even while they are watching 'Newsnight' (which will have to be renamed 'Newsday' in Summer if Berlin Time ever is introduced here).  

 

Berlin Time, 'antidepressants' and 'Reefer Madness'

My  simple, factual and logical case – that countries should set their clocks according to the natural time at which noon occurs over their territory (i.e when the sun is at its zenith) has an amazing capacity to infuriate certain people.

 

I don’t really understand why they get so cross, unless it’s because they know I’m right and wish I would shut up because they have some shameful interest in doing what they know to be wrong. A lot of people , I think, take this view of me, hence the rages which follow my attacks on pseudo-scientific inventions, which validate poor teaching, bad parenting or lazy medicine and commercial greed,  such as ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’ - or ‘Clinical Depression’ – as for ‘depression’ see this interesting account: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2437657/Happy-pills-Critics-claim-antidepressants-handed-like-sweets-Now-shocking-experiment-uncovers--The-proof-doctors-doling-happy-pills-asks.html 

 

 

To this day I have yet to see a solid material argument for the mad ceremony of moving our clocks forward just as Spring is lightening the evening skies perfectly adequately anyway. On the other hand, since we have taken to doing this loopy, disruptive thing (invented by a property developer who hated the fact that other people didn’t get up as early as he did, and a bug-hunter who wanted to chase insects through the gloaming, and thought time should be shifted to suit him) , there’s a powerful case for putting them back to where they ought to be in autumn, which appeals to any of the millions who need to get up early for work or school.

 

This habitual idiocy, the pushing forward of clocks in Spring,  has now been going on for almost a century (having been intensified during the semi-totalitarian War-Communism of 1939-45, when such inconveniences were foisted on us to promote a spirit of shared adversity), and now affects much of the world. Perhaps a lot of people object to having this pointed out because it’s embarrassing to admit that you have been doing something daft for decades, and never even thought about it.

 

Well, Spain, which has for some years been on Berlin Time (look at a map to see how absurd this is) is now wondering whether this is a good idea – as you may read here.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24294157

 

My thanks to Darren, from Orpington,  the reader who pointed this out. Alas, we will never hear anything similar from poor France, though it really ought to be on the same time as us(look at a map, once again). But that country’s subservience to Germany in all things is the price it pays for being allowed to pose as a world power and maintain a toy nuclear deterrent.

 

On ‘Reefer Madness’, I am always puzzled that dope campaigners seem to think that mentions of this otherwise forgotten 1936 film, which is plainly of no value in any serious discussion, somehow close the debate about cannabis and mental illness.

 

The film predates (by more than 30 years) the isolation of the main active ingredient in cannabis, THC. It predates the long experience this country now has of cannabis users seeking psychiatric care and the correlation, observed by Professor Sir Robin Murray of the Maudsley hospital among others, between cannabis use (especially in the early teens) and mental illness.

 

Correlation, as we all know, is not necessarily evidence of causation. But nor is it necessarily *not* evidence of causation. It is certainly highly suggestive in this case, and is the subject of so many so-called ‘anecdotes’ that any unprejudiced person must accept that there is reason for concern.

 

Nor would it be surprising that a potent mind-altering drug has the power to trigger mental illness.

 

Due to the extreme difficulty of achieving objective classifications of mental illness (which does not mean that physiological mental illness does not exist ,as some of my thicker opponents have tried to suggest) , or of categorising those mental illnesses that are observed in any reliable way, statistics on this matter are hard to achieve or obtain. But those who mock ‘Reefer Madness’, as if it were the argument of modern campaigners against cannabis,  might do well to turn to Patrick Cockburn’s recent book ‘Henry’s Demons’.  There they may read  what happened to his son Henry *after* he used cannabis as a schoolboy, and see if they still think the subject is risible.