It's called "British Summer Time" here, but I wish we'd stick to GMT all year round. There are plenty in Britain who call for BST to be year-round but they don't account for two things.
Firstly it "saves" no daylight at all, simply moves the reference-point for counting the hours. The nights and days are still long and short according to season and latitude.
Secondly and as a direct result of that, the alleged extra hour of daylight "saved" in the evening simply means an hour "lost" to darkness in the morning.
So "Daylight Saving Time", "saves" absolutely nothing at all! It is a myth! It works if at all because we are diurnal creatures but find it hard to work diurnally. We have conditioned ourselves to active days and evenings timetabled on days symmetrical about noon and midnight, and active evenings. Noon and midnight are symmetrical when noon is set to Solar time (as are GMT and equivalents elsewhere), but our lives follow a self-imposed, approximate 7am - 5pm symmetry followed by some hours often under artificial light; and in the depths of a Northern Winter both ends of the day are dark anyway. You either travel to work in the dark and come home in the dusk or travel out in pre-dawn twilight and come home in the dark.
It was allegedly a WW2 invention, some say to help hard-pressed farmers, others say because it made life a bit harder for the Luftwaffe bombing raids, but neither argument stacks up really.
This is more the further North you go, even in a country like mainland Britain which is no more than about 700 miles "long" from South coast to North coast, but even in the South is at sufficiently high latitude to be significantly marked by the seasonal variation. I think most of the calls for year-round "daylight saving time" in Britain are Southern English - probably Londoners as many of them seem to find the rest of the country hard to understand and rather unimportant!
It is now 5pm GMT and nearly dark, here on the South coast of England, very slightly S by latitude from London and I think a couple of degrees or so to the West by longitude.
Thank you for your very thoughtful and informative reply Durdle. I appreciate it. So homo sapheads invent something for whatever purpose they believe it will serve and then just stay with it. Why? Because it was always done that way so why change it? Our world has changed in a bazillion ways since daylight savings was invented. But that stays. Holding on to something that serves no purpose just because doesn't make any sense to me. I wonder if one day when ti doesn't make sense to anyone it will be changed? :)
This post was edited by RosieG at November 2, 2020 1:48 AM MST
Durdle 