Reject All Year Summer Time- MP

10.17.04am UTC (GMT +0000) Mon 30th Oct 2006

Mr Bruce will oppose any moves to create all year summer time in the UK.

Calls by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents for summer time to continue throughout the winter and for double summer time to be introduced in the spring will be vigorously resisted in Parliament claims Liberal Democrat MP Malcolm Bruce who has strenuously campaigned against similar moves in the past.

Mr Bruce explains, "As wearily predictably as hearings of the first cuckoo in spring come calls for all year round summer time with claims that it would reduce accidents on the roads.

"This is not conclusive as, in reality, the rise in road deaths in winter has more to do with less daylight and poorer conditions due to fog, wet and icy roads, which changing the clocks won't alter. It also doesn't look at the effect of such changes across the whole of society - such as the distribution of depression caused by shorter hours of daylight.

"More fundamentally, because the UK is tilted from south-east to north-west these proposals fly in the face of geography. The Greenwich meridian leaves 90 per cent of the UK to the west of the central point of GMT. So, although the effects of changing the clocks are more exaggerated the further north and west you go it is fundamentally an east-west issue

"The UK is in the right time zone but on the western side of it. Rospa's proposals are the equivalent of relocating Britain into eastern Europe. It is France, Spain and the Benelux countries that are in the wrong time zone. Portugal tried to align itself with Spain a few years ago and was forced to revert to our time zone.

"By all means let's have a campaign to reduce accidents at a time of short winter days but don't try and turn the world on its axis.

ENDS