Pressure group Lighter Later urges us to lobby our MPs to support putting the clocks forward an extra hour throughout the year, i.e. GMT+1hr and BST+1hr (so we’d still change the clocks twice a year).

An article in Cumnor Parish News employs some specious arguments backed by impressive graphs to claim benefits based on a “normal nine-to-five working day”, talking of wasted daylight in the mornings.

This argument is flawed. By no means everyone starts work at 9am; I leave home at 7am, and others I know even earlier – early morning daylight is not wasted on us.

The claim that lighter afternoons will reduce road accidents is questionable. Darker mornings, when there are people travelling to school, college and work all at the same time, are surely more dangerous than afternoons, when journeys are spaced out over a longer period.

The group’s own graph shows that with advanced winter time it will stay dark till about 9am for three months of the year – and that is for Oxford.

Further north it will be later – as much as an hour or more in Scotland, as I discovered in Edinburgh in the 60s during an experimental period of year-round BST.

But might there also be a hidden agenda?

The proposed change would put us on the same time zone as continental Europe. Well, God forbid that we should be out of step with Europe!

But surely the arguments used for Britain to advance its clocks applies equally to countries further east, so they should advance their clocks too and we’d be out of step again.

Campaigners want us to lobby our MPs to support their proposal in a Parliamentary debate on December 3. If you agree, fine, but if you see this as a bad move, then please contact your MP to vote against it.

Lee Graham, Cumnor Hill, Oxford