SO we’ve gone and done it again and mucked around with the clocks. Now it’s dark at 5pm and, in a month’s time, it will be dark at four. Why do we do it when experience and oft-repeated research has proved beyond any doubt that the darker evenings cause more deaths on the roads than darker mornings?

This is not a piece of prejudice or irrational opinion on my part but based thoroughly on objective evidence. Moreover, there is not a shred of reasonableness in the way we move the clocks. Consider this: we have just put the clocks back, a mere six weeks before the shortest day, the winter solstice.

Why then – if we must beggar with our timepieces – do we not at least put them forward again six weeks after the shortest day, instead of leaving them alone until the end of March – thus extending the self-imposed winter dark evenings into the springtime?

If, as I say, we must fiddle around with the clocks, why not balance things up by putting them forward six weeks after the shortest day?

Then at least we should have the restoration of lighter evenings by early February?

As things stand, our self-inflicted gloom extends over Easter whenever that festival occurs early.

I have lived in both the north of England and in the south and so I know that winter darkness falls even earlier in the north. I know from old geography lessons that the further north you go, the earlier the winter sunset. So I am familiar with the objection that leaving the clocks on British Summer Time throughout the winter would increase even more severely the winter darkness in Scotland. But, if Scotsmen don’t like this, why don’t they make their own arrangements with their own clocks?

Every few years there is an attempt by private members’ bills to bring about the reform I have suggested. And every time this is tried, the attempt fails owing to the cross-party consensus on the matter. I should like to know just how much this is down to decisions decreed in Brussels and the undue influence wielded by the EU bureaucrats over our national interests?

There are further considerations. During the Second World War, we employed double summertime – putting the clocks forwards two hours in the spring – under the terms of a measure which became known as daylight saving. In 2013, we are being told every day that we are in an energy supply crisis – something we all know anyhow through our constantly rising fuel bills. Isn’t this just the time therefore to reintroduce daylight saving?

I’m afraid this business with the clocks is just one example of the negligible part played by rationality and common sense in our politics and public affairs generally.

For instance, where is the sense – let alone the sound economics – in paying rich landowners for the privilege of erecting thousands of unsightly and useless windmills on their property? Would it not be reasonable instead to divert the money paid out in these colossal bribes to the cause of reducing household fuel bills generally?

And, when the case for fracking has been demonstrated as utterly sound, why are we not proceeding with it at full pace, as they have been doing for years in the US with the resulting vast improvements to the economy there and to the consequent decreased reliance on the supply of oil from the unstable Middle East? If the lights go out in Britain it will not be owing to some unavoidable catastrophe but to our own downright folly.