Sunday 27 March 2011
I had hoped to post this article when the news was current, but was unfortunately extremely busy, and had little to no time recently. Nonetheless, in this article, I give my take on the debate regarding moving Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT) and British Summer Time (BST) an hour forward respectively, so that the UK would in effect use Central European Time (CET) in winter, and Central European Summer Time (CEST) in summer.
GMT (also known as Western European Time or WET) and UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) are identical for practical purposes, the difference is negligible (only a fraction of a second), and the same applies for BST (also known as Western European Summer Time or WEST) and GMT+1. Similarly, CET can be regarded as equivalent to UTC+1, and CEST as equivalent to UTC+2 for practical purposes.
Throughout this article, I will be referring to UTC only to avoid ambiguity, and because UTC (not GMT) has been the main reference for time worldwide since 1972. Having said that, one can still use GMT as a synonym for UTC, BST as a synonym for UTC+1, etc.
