Leading article: Time's up

We have a suggestion. Instead of putting the clocks back by an hour tonight, why don't we leave them alone? For too long have we submitted ourselves to this irritating and obsolete practice. Our society has changed hugely since our political masters first decided to fiddle about with national timekeeping during the First World War. Now is the time to stop changing between British Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time and instead adopt a British Standard Time. The only difference between BST and GMT is an hour of daylight on winter mornings. And surely it's more useful to have extra light in the evening these days.

We work in offices, rather than factories now. Most of us are more likely to work late rather than get in early. An extra hour of light later in the day would also mean savings in electricity and fuel use. And here's the clincher: we would be in harmony with most of Europe.

There you have it. Keeping the clocks as they are is modern, environmentally friendly and pro-European: the perfect Independent policy.