UK clocks go back – but 2020's change won't mean extra drinking time

At 2am on Sunday 25 October British summer time (BST) comes to an end, the country puts the clocks back an hour to 1am, and we go back to observing Greenwich mean time (GMT).

The clocks going back is usually a bonanza for the entertainment and hospitality industry. If your bar shuts at 2am, by the time it rolls around, it is suddenly 1am again, and you can in theory stay open for another hour. However, under current coronavirus restrictions, everything fun has to shut at 10pm on Saturday night. If you are under tier 3 restrictions in England, mind you, there won’t have been much opportunity to go out anyway.

Of course, for those working shifts, the downside is that it possibly means having to put in an extra hour’s work. And for people who have small children or pets, the concept of time is immaterial, as you just have to get up whenever they wake up anyway.

At least there’s still the joy of working out which of your gadgets have automatically corrected themselves, and which you have to try to remember how to change the clock on manually. Microwaves and washing machines – I’m looking at you.

You could say that changing the clocks is a ritual as old as time itself – except it isn’t. It is only just over 100 years since the concept of changing the clocks in the UK was introduced, by the 1916 Summer Time Act. Despite the results of an EU survey a couple of years ago suggesting that more than 80% of British respondents wanted to abolish the idea of daylight-saving clock changes, there does not seem to be any great political will to do so. That means those of you who do manage to get an extra hour’s sleep on Sunday can look forward to giving it away again when the clocks next move forward at 1am on Sunday 28 March 2021.

There remains the intriguing prospect that in the not-too-distant future the British Isles may ultimately end up with a timezone border across them. The European parliament recently voted to scrap mandatory clock-changing at an EU level, leaving it up to national governments to decide. EU member states will be able to choose whether to remain on “permanent summer” or “permanent winter” time. Depending on what the Republic of Ireland decides, we could end up with a timezone barrier across the British border with Ireland for six months of the year.

Although the number of hours of daylight does vary around the globe there is no real scientific basis for changing the clocks. Legend has it the first motivation for wanting longer, lighter evenings was down to a gentleman called William Willett who wanted to be able to play golf for longer. He obviously never had to deal with a washing machine with a clock showing the wrong time for six months because the instructions had been thrown away.