Current Politics in the United Kingdom

[G-Type]

For the records: ~52% of the people in the UK wanted to exit from EU, hence your government complied to this "majority" and decided to go for the separation. Fair - n´est-ce pas?

For the records: ~80% of the people in the EU have voted by poll to turn away from the semi-annual change of time. Hence, there will be a process within the EU to comply to this big majority and to reverse to a standard that most people find more to their likings.

Fair - n`est-ce pas
.

[Wendigo]

Just to be straight .... for the record

"In the largest survey ever conducted by the European Commission, 80% of around 4.6 million respondents said they favor abolishing the finicky practice of changing the clocks in summer and winter. "

That is not 80% of people in the EU just 80% of respondants.
The 80% was 4.6 million people out of an EU population of 512.6 million.

It was an online survey so there is no evidence as to how many EU citizens are not actually bothered.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultati...rrangements_en
https://ec.europa.eu/ireland/news/co...saving-time_en

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Just to be straight .... for the record

"In the largest survey ever conducted by the European Commission, 80% of around 4.6 million respondents said they favor abolishing the finicky practice of changing the clocks in summer and winter. "

That is not 80% of people in the EU just 80% of respondants.
The 80% was 4.6 million people out of an EU population of 512.6 million.

It was an online survey so there is no evidence as to how many EU citizens are not actually bothered.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultati...rrangements_en
https://ec.europa.eu/ireland/news/co...saving-time_en

Not even that. It was 80% of 4.6 million people, meaning 3.7 million people, rounding upwards. Until the story about the Commission's decision I was not even aware that this proposal existed, and I doubt very much if 508.2 million other EU citizens knew about it either. Is it really alright to make a change with a very real impact on daily life on the basis of a "consultation" which reached less than 1% of the EU population?

Regardless of the above, I strongly deny that the EU Commission is entitled to make such a decision at all. This has nothing to do with EU business - it is brazen meddling in the domestic affairs of member states. Member states should make their own decisions about which time zone they are in, same as they always have; for example Spain has considered reverting to GMT, which it moved away from in 1940 when Franco was sucking up to Hitler, but it seems unlikely that they will really do it because everyone is used to things as they are. That's an important point the EU keeps missing. Change for the sake of change is a bad thing; the EU loves to fix things which aren't broken.

[G-Type]

O.K. Guys, we all know the traps of statistics, votes whatsoever.

And you are right insofar, that 80% of ~5 Million people does not necessarily reflect the entity, however it pictures a trend. Be it 75,7% or 69,3% for the wider entity, it would certainly depict a majority.

I am not intending to nit-pick, but the 52% Pro-Brexit voters in your country do also not picture the reality in total because it´s only 52% of those who had gone to the poll.

Just a scenario to think of: If all people in your country had been forced by law to vote and the outcome had been 50,000001% to stay within the EU and 49,999999% to leave or the other way round, you would always have defended the vote of the majority...be it as small as possible.

What I wanna say is this: 80% of something certainly pictures a trend more profoundly than does a 52% / 48%-situation.

Just imagine: If you had been participating in the a.m. poll regarding time and you would have wanted to keep things as they are, it would have been a tremendous success if you had mobilized 2 or 3 millions of people to vote against. You might have got the result that you wanted to have...

...within the EU
.

[bloke57]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

The British government did this before, between October 1968 and October 1971, and there is a reason why the experiment was abandoned. I know why, because I vividly remember walking to infants school in the morning through snow and ice and in pitch darkness. It is not a fun memory. There is a reason why we change time between summer and winter and it is a system which works.

Just a thought, but surely solved by simply having a revised winter timetable for schools.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by bloke57

Just a thought, but surely solved by simply having a revised winter timetable for schools.

But then you would need to revise the timetable for shops, factories and offices, because you are pushing back the school run by an hour. It would rather defeat the point of the exercise.

[bloke57]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

But then you would need to revise the timetable for shops, factories and offices, because you are pushing back the school run by an hour. It would rather defeat the point of the exercise.

Fair point. I'm of the generation before "the school run" in that we went to a local school and never dreamed of being driven there in a luxury tractor.

Having said that, it's about time more businesses offered flexi-time as routine. If they are not customer facing, it makes no odds. No need for everyone to be a slave to the clock. For instance, the hi-fi shop "Richer Sounds" opens at 10.00 as there is very little need to be open for business earlier in that particular sphere.

[jacques22]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

"In the largest survey ever conducted by the European Commission, 80% of around 4.6 million respondents said they favor abolishing the finicky practice of changing the clocks in summer and winter. "

That is not 80% of people in the EU just 80% of respondants.
The 80% was 4.6 million people out of an EU population of 512.6 million.

4.6 million people is still a huge sample size.
Especially when you compare with the sample size for the Brexit polls: http://www.britishpollingcouncil.org...eu-referendum/

For Brexit polls, the largest sample size was 4,740. So the 4.6 million people polled for the summer time change represent a sample about 1,000 times larger than for any Brexit poll. In mathematical theory, the margin of error should be therefore smaller in the case of the poll for summer time change.

Even if we take the largest margin of error for a Brexit poll (7%), the poll for the summer time change still gives a much larger majority than for Brexit. So it doesn't make any sense to discredit the result of that poll, whether people agree or not with the outcome.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by jacques22

4.6 million people is still a huge sample size.
Especially when you compare with the sample size for the Brexit polls: http://www.britishpollingcouncil.org...eu-referendum/

For Brexit polls, the largest sample size was 4,740. So the 4.6 million people polled for the summer time change represent a sample about 1,000 times larger than for any Brexit poll. In mathematical theory, the margin of error should be therefore smaller in the case of the poll for summer time change.

Even if we take the largest margin of error for a Brexit poll (7%), the poll for the summer time change still gives a much larger majority than for Brexit. So it doesn't make any sense to discredit the result of that poll, whether people agree or not with the outcome.

I didn't actually discredit the poll if you read what I actually wrote I just pointed out that what was originally said namely
~80% of the people in the EU have voted by poll
was factually wrong.

[scoundrel]

I am the one who highlighted the smallness of the poll as compared with the number of people who will be affected by the proposed change. I agree that it is still a very big opinion poll, but I would also point out that it will be a poll of the sort of people who browse the EU website and respond to EU polls - a skewed and biased sample. In the same way, our thread poll shows between 54% and 56% in favour of Leave, remaining in this range consistently as it has grown from 400 to over 600 votes - but it is a population skewed in favour of grumpy old men.

One would be foolish to extrapolate either poll as representative of the overall population.