Daylight Extra and UK General Election

[Peter Ilieve]

Chris Carrier <72157.3334 at CompuServe.COM> wrote:

> As most of you know, on May 1 the United Kingdom had a General Election for
> Parliament and Labor got in with a substantial majority.

Chris, I'm surprised. I wouldn't have thought you would have missed
a detail like this. It is the Labour Party, currently trading under
the brand name New Labour. :-)

> The results of one race might be interesting to some of us: the seat held by
> John Butterfill (Con., Bournemouth West).  Butterfill in 1995 introduced a
> bill, known as the Daylight Extra Bill, which would have put the UK on summer
> time in winter and double summer time in summer, to synchronise it with the
> rest of the EU.  There was an attempt to force it out of committee; this
> requires the assent of 100 MPs (out of, I believe, a total number of 630) and
> the Bill received the support of 93.

What actually happened was there were insufficient MPs to force a vote
on closing the debate, so a vote could be taken on the Bill itself.
Only 93 were present, so presumably the debate rambled on without coming
to any conclusion. This was at the stage called second reading, which is
before the Bill would have been considered in detail by a committee of MPs.
There were 650 MPs in the old Parliament, 659 in the new one. The fact that
only 93 were present out of 650 was not particularly suprising. There
aren't actually enough seats for all of them anyway.

> What I would like to ask is if anyone saw anything concerning Daylight Extra
> during the General Election as a whole or in Bournemouth West specifically.

Much as we might wish it otherwise, discussion of the policies relating
to time of any of the major parties was notable only by its complete
absence. A `grep -i time' through the manifesto text of each of the
three major parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat) finds nothing
relevent at all. A search though The Times between 1 March 97 and 30 April 97
for `daylight extra' also shows no hits. I didn't read all the election
coverage in the papers I read but I didn't spot anything; neither did
I hear anything on radio news.

I admit I am a long way from Bournmouth, but I doubt it was much different
down there.

People here may get worked up about proposed changes to Summer Time
arrangements and changes of timezone when a specific proposal appears
but otherwise it really isn't an issue at all.


		Peter Ilieve		peter at aldie.co.uk