It's an Official Rant

I don't have many, rants that is, but it really gets my goat up when the powers that be start talking we should fall into line with Europe on the clocks front.. why?

I am british, born british, educated across the world, lived in Europe for 3 years and loved it, travel in-frequently to world-wide destinations and done business with both the European Sector and Americans/Canadians during my time here at the University of the Back of Beyond.

First and Foremost : London, England is the home of Greenwich Mean Time which started when British sailors kept at least one chronometer on GMT in order to calculate their longitude from the Greenwich meridian, which was by convention considered to have longitude zero degrees

Shipboard time itself was still solar time. But this practice, combined with mariners from other nations eventually led to GMT being used worldwide as a reference time independent of location.

Most time zones were based upon this reference as a number of hours and half-hours "ahead of GMT" or "behind GMT". So when they talk about us joining the same European time as Spain, which is many degrees further South than London, or even Italy it makes no sense to me as their days will be different to that of London, in terms of daylight.

Secondly : On a business level, I have managed successfully the 12 hour differences between UK and Australia when talking to a firm providing software to us, likewise the 5, 7 or 8 hour differences between zones in the US and Canada so I can find no good reason to align us to Europe for the one hour that exists.

Not only that but our friends in Scotland would be heavily penalised by the time differences involved and yet another wave of power would be held in European hands..

There seems to be no pride in keeping Britain British, instead we weakly surrender ourselves to our European Neighbours and while their interpretation of the rules can be somewhat elastic, we Brits follow it to the letter of the law.

I want to keep Greenwich Mean Time, for the history of what it means to our country, for what it means to us as a people and not just surrender it meekly because of a weak excuse of business needs... What say you?