From Mark Le Cornu.
WITH the approach of the referendum on Central European Time, perhaps we need to take a slightly different look at reasons why we should remain on Greenwich Mean Time plus one hour (British Summer Time) in the summer.

Currently we are linked to the UK and the arguments concerning business, television schedules, air travel and various other factors have already been aired. My preference is for no change, but I nevertheless accept that if the UK government adopt CET we would have no alternative but to do so as well.

However, there are good geophysical reasons why we should avoid CET, the first and foremost being that we are situated in north-west, not central, Europe. As a result, nearly all of the British Isles, excepting a sliver of East Anglia, is west of the Greenwich Meridian. As sunrise or sunset varies by one hour every 15 degrees of longitude it means that we (and by that I mean not just Jersey but the British Isles as a whole) are quite simply in the ‘wrong’ place to be in the Central European Time zone. After all, the latitudinal distance between western Ireland or Portugal and the eastern fringes of Europe is similar to the USA coast to coast, and the Americans seem to manage with several time zones.

The other thing we should consider is that we live at 50 degrees north in the English Channel. As a consequence we are very much at a crossroads for extremely varied weather. The sea temperature only gets above 18 degrees for a few weeks at the end of the summer and it is fairly rare for the temperature to stay above 20 Celsius overnight. Simply by putting the clock on by an hour will not suddenly turn us into an extension of the Mediterranean with (and I quote from Christine Herbert’s article of 19 August) ‘cafés spilling out onto the pavements and squares . . . well past 10 pm . . .’

In fact, I was in town on the middle Friday in July. I walked past a very popular restaurant (which appeared packed inside) at around 8.15 pm. It was a sunny evening and tables were set outside but there was not a single person in the al fresco area because it was simply too cold and breezy. As this shows, there are not that many occasions, even in the best of summers, when it is truly warm enough to sit out until really late into the evening. In which case, surely our current hours of dusk (around 9.30 to 10 pm in mid-summer) will suffice?

And what about CET during the winter? Have people considered that even at this time of the year sunrise would not be until about 8 am and in November, December and January dawn will be around 9 o’clock? If it is dull, it’ll be almost mid-morning before it is properly light. I’m sure that builders, farmers and others who start early will not be in favour.
The argument about children coming home from school in the dark if we remain on GMT no longer holds, as they finish at around 3.15 pm these days. Even if it is light in the evening for the hour between 4 and 5 pm, that still isn’t sufficient to use as leisure time, and in any case, who would be playing golf or tennis or sitting outside a restaurant or café if it is windy and pouring with rain, or else freezing cold?

Finally, whatever we adopt, there will be no difference in the number of daylight hours, so why do people keep talking about an ‘extra’ hour if we move to CET?
1 Sunwaye Gardens,
Bel Royal,
St Lawrence.