The Kent MP Nigel Beard, for his proposal to allow England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be in different timezones. (More information in this BBC article)

I was told about the bill by a workmate who had heard it on Radio 4 on the way to work, and didn’t quite believe it. But then Garry talked about the same story on his weblog and linked to the BBC news item.

The basic proposal is that each of the devolved parliaments in each part of the UK will be able to vote to be in whatever timezone they wish. The reason is that on several occasions English MP’s have attempted to get the UK to align with neighbouring countries in mainland Europe such as France and Germany, changing UK time by one hour. However the measure has always been voted down by Scottish MP’s because of the limited daylight in Scotland during the winter months. The idea is that England and Wales could switch to European time, and leave the Scottish to stick with GMT (named after a place in England that wouldn’t be in the timezone any more!).

However, whilst it neatly solves the daylight problem and brings us into line with our European neighbours, it will cause all sorts of other problems for people who deal with time within the UK. Currently at work we are expanding a trading system to include Scotland into the England and Wales electricity trading arrangements. The idea is that it will simplify matters by trading electricity country wide, but all of that suddenly gets hideously more complicated if different parts of the system are in different timezones. Under the current plans for BETTA, anything that is different in Scotland, such as Bank Holidays, conforms system wide to what happens in England. Trading days are English trading days, and closed on English Bank Holidays. I expect that if Scotland went to a different timezone, then the whole system would be run on English time.

Anyway, that is just one small example of a problem that is created. The question is, what is more of a problem, having a different timezone from the rest of Europe, or having more than one timezone in the UK?

I’ve spent part of my Saturday updating the software driving the WebLog. I got an e-mail midweek saying that a new version of WordPress had been released fixing a minor security issue that had been highlighted.

The upgrade is slightly complicated by a number of the plug-ins I have running on the site to handle things like the Amazon links and a couple of utilities to aid in adding pictures to posts which although they in the main fit into the WordPress plug-in architecture need modifications to a couple of the core files. Thankfully I only broke a couple of things in the upgrade, which were easily spotted and fixed.

I also took the opportunity to upgrade the versions of a couple of the plug-ins, and also to provide a link to Firefox, a cross-platform browser that I’ve used for a number of months alongside Safari, the browser that comes with the Mac. One of my main reasons for putting in the link is that it now includes ‘RSS’ support, so if you view a site like this, that offers an RSS feed, using the browser, it will allow you to link to the feed, and give you an up to date list of entries on the site.

For Windows users, it’s other big advantage is that it is considerably more secure than Internet Explorer, and according to many reviewers, now a significantly better browser!

We had further news about the Canadian submarine bought second hand from the Royal Navy. Whereas my previous posting was pretty lighthearted, overnight things have got rather more serious. The rescue teams have reached the stranded sub, and airlifted the injured, one of which has subsequently died. An attempt is going to be made to tow the submarine back to Scotland, but seas are currently rough. The crew have no power as they can’t get the engine started.

In addition, the news item this morning had more detail about the deal, whereby the Canadians were buying four second hand submarines from the UK, however only this one has been delivered, as the other three are still in dock suffering from technical difficulties.

It is worth saying that there is a joke in Canada that there are more submarines in the West Edmonton Mall than there are in the Canadian Navy. Whether buying a job lot of second hand submarines from the UK, that have been mothballed for ten years, and which can’t even make it more than a few hundred miles before breaking down is going to change that I don’t know, but it doesn’t overly help matters. Of course one has to wonder quite what the UK were doing letting one of the submarines go when there were known problems with the other three.

Driving home yesterday, the BBC reported that a Canadian Submarine was adrift in the Atlantic off the Irish coast. The report then described how there had been a fire, and that the submarine had lost power.

What was glossed over, was where the submarine came from… The Royal Navy! In addition, the Canadian Navy had only just taken collection of the submarine. Two days ago there was a ceremonial renaming, as the HMS Upholder became the HMCS Chicoutimi. The submarine had been decomissioned from the Royal Navy in 1994, and sold to Canada for the bargain price of £244 million. This was the Navy equivalent of picking up a second hand car and it breaking down as soon as you drive it off the lot!

Take a look at the ongoing story from the BBC.