Given the hysteria over false health scares like MMR it is little less than sensational humbug that we deliberately kill roughly 100 children every year. We will all, individually and collectively, contribute to the massacre this weekend. Make no mistake: the fact that we put our clocks back each October is not because of some inescapable force of nature. It is a calculated decision; a political choice made by ministers. And let?s be clear: that choice has appalling consequences ? real blood, pain, disfigurements, disabilities and bereavements on a scale that, if it happened in any other context, would scandalise the nation.

Of course for many us changing the clocks twice a year is little more than a minor inconvenience; and though we grumble each Spring because the change robs us of 60-minutes, at this time of year we welcome a luxurious extra hour in bed. But somehow there is an intellectual disconnect between that little domestic chore of re-setting our watches and timers and its terrible consequences, year after year after year. Its huge costs in human life has been researched and accepted in report after official report. Its murderous effect is as sure as if we had led dozens of children up a mountain and offered them to the gods. But this human sacrifice is not to the gods; it is on the altar of unthinking politics.

Politicians are more worried about upsetting the reported objections of a few hundred farmers tending livestock than about the resulting and measurable cull of human young.

It is a real low in the ethics of British public life. Of course there is a down side to having a darker start to the day, mostly that as you go further north you can have eerily and frustratingly long gloomy mornings. Some farmers and construction workers have a legitimate objection. But in the balance of right and wrong can their inconvenience seriously be thought to be worth 100 or more families bereaved each year?

Not all politicians are blas? about these young casualties. There have been attempts by private members to change the hours, most recently this month by Bexleyheath MP Nigel Beard. His arguments were valid and well researched and does not say much for the shallowness of fellow?MPs that the bill failed, and nor was it the finest hour of elements of the Scottish press that, finding a Sassenach to attack, gave Mr Beard a rough ride. Mercifully most Scottish journalists, and many politicians nowadays take a rather more thoughtful approach. Indeed, the Scottish Executive now accepts that changing the clocks would also save Scots’ lives, and a survey earlier this year by the safety group RoSPA suggested that, if the public at large knew about the savings, a majority of Scottish voters would support retaining British Summer Time.

The reason that putting back the clocks is so very deadly is that it deprives us of daylight in the afternoons when people, and especially children, are more active and yet less conscientious. For some reason we humans tend to be more cautious in the early mornings. Parents may worry that their youngsters will more often be heading off to school each weekday in the dark, but at least the morning journey tends to be direct, and drivers tend to be more focused. After school it?s often a different story, with motorists less attentive and a host of distractions for kids: friends, shops, and just milling around in the street.

The evidence is not mere theory; we have tried retaining summer time and found it saves a lot of lives. Between 1968 and 1971 Britain experimented with Greenwich Mean Time plus one hour throughout the year. As expected, with darker mornings there was an increase in morning casualties, but the reduction in evening casualties far outweighed it: an overall drop of 2,500 deaths and serious injuries in the first two winters of the experiment.

In 1998 the Transport Research Laboratory took another look at the evidence and concluded we could safely assume there would be 450 fewer deaths and serious injuries each year if we abandoned this bizarre October ritual.

Motorists who have been through an advanced driving course tend to be more aware than most of hazards, but the dangers of darkness in the afternoon are insidious. I have witnessed a schoolboy half-dead in the street and permanently brain-damaged because coming home from school he excitedly stepped off the kerb in front of a passing van. It was an accident, of course, but also a consequence of political decisions.

We abandoned GMT in summer back in 1916, after a builder called William Willett, from Petts Wood in Kent, proposed that ?daylight saving? would save money and, above all, improve the nation?s health. If only he had suggested that daylight saving be continued throughout the year. Indeed, suppose we had always been on perpetual British Summer Time, would we now seriously contemplate moving to GMT in winter when all best evidence suggested it would kill 100 people and injure thousands more?

It is no more than complacency, inertia and political cowardice that keeps us where we are. Perhaps The Independent would care to print a list of all those MPs and SMPs who would support abandonment of winter GMT, and list of those who won?t. We can then stick pins in pictures of the latter. Being pictures, they won?t bleed of course. Unlike their constituents. Let this year be the last that we put the clocks back in this way. If not let us hear the name of each MP who would vote to continue this dark-age carnage.

Nick Ross is a council member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and a BBC presenter. His views do not represent those of the BBC.

Most Britons think crime is rising, not declining. Not so. We are safer than ever. So why are we all scared?

Today the BBC will publish a survey which should shame sections of British journalism. It shows that as a nation we are paying an unnecessarily high price for crime. Most people seem convinced that crime in general is rising relentlessly when all the ways of measuring it show otherwise. It’s not a minor misconception. On car crime for example people overestimate the chance of being victim by six-fold. It’s not just property crime. They believe the very worst crimes are growing more rampant – for example, that children are much more likely to be abducted and murdered now than in the past. In fact in the year after Sarah Payne’s murder a survey by the NSPCC could not find a single case of a child abducted and murdered by a stranger and, largely because of better social services, child murders in general have halved since the 1970s.

These are no mere abstract misapprehensions. As Peter Snow will report tonight, more than one in every eight people are trapped in their homes after dark because they dread becoming victims if they go into the streets. The elderly are the least likely to be targets of crime but have become the most fearful – they have been intimidated by propaganda and half-truths. And this in a country which should have all the wisdom of being served by more newspapers than any other, and a steady stream of broadcast news.

When politicians attack the media it’s often because they’re worried and looking for scapegoats, and David Blunkett’s harangue last week, about the “all-knowing, less-understanding national press,” was easily dismissed as the rantings of a minister on the defensive. But maybe he has a point.

Crime statistics are unreliable, and I’ll return to this in a moment, but both main ways of measuring crime – police figures and victim surveys – agree that crime is falling, and has been for many years. Political opponents of whichever party is in power might like to believe otherwise so they have a stick with which to poke the prevailing government, but falling crime does not have much to do with party politics – the downward trend under Labour started under the Conservatives. It follows a similar pattern in the United States which transcended Democrat and Republican administrations.

One of the reasons for the drop, perhaps the main one, is that opportunities for crime are being cut. Vehicle security is one of the most obvious examples. Designers who were once reckless about crime are now making it more difficult for thieves and fraudsters, and even mobile phone companies have become alert to the need to make their products just a bit more crime resistant.

But some of the media remain stuck in a nineteenth century view of crime, a breathless penny dreadful litany of horror stories. Simplistic statistics – which any decently inquisitive journalist could demolish with a little basic research – are trotted out as though they were unquestionable fact.

In particular the Home Office figures traditionally used as a yardstick of crime are a feeble and capricious measure of whether crime is rising or declining. They are inflated or distorted by frequent changes in police procedures, definitions, or insurance rules. As David Blunkett pointed out, “The more you get crimes reported, the more crime goes up, the more I get slagged off.” So why do journalists keep relying on police figures? Well, for one thing journalists are often lazy and like to keep things simple. For some the golden rule is never do that extra bit of research if it might knock down your story. If you don’t come up with the simple, stark copy your editor wants then the editor might find someone else to send out in your place tomorrow.

There’s another reason reporters are sometimes gullible about police statistics: journalism, like nature, deplores a vacuum and where there are no dependable facts journalists tend to grab whatever they can find. Police statistics may be as reliable as smoke and mirrors but they are broken down by borough and are regularly updated. The much more trustworthy alternatives, the studies which ask individuals about their actual experiences, only paint a national picture of crime are only published annually. But that doesn’t help journalists who have deadlines measured in hours and minutes. So never mind scruples about whether everything that’s said is strictly accurate, let alone placed in proper context, some cut corners much of the time. And if all crime figures point to an overall decline there is a temptation to single out any indicator that looks bad. Hence the current panic over street crime which has been allowed to corrode our confidence about crime in general. Or we ignore the figures altogether – anecdotal evidence is always compelling, and we can forever find horror stories of people who’ve been brutalised through crime.

So laziness, the need for immediate gratification, political bias – all these things can contribute to a climate of misreporting about crime. But another factor is what many people see as the curmudgeonly, gloomy, whingeing personality of so much journalism today. Proper scepticism is one thing, but few would deny that coverage of crime is steeped in a dismal view of life perpetuated by almost all the national press. This sneering disdain is so entrenched that when the newscaster Martyn Lewis pointed out the obvious – that there is too much bad news and not enough celebration of the good – he was ridiculed as being wet behind the ears.

Thus, as we’ve become safer somehow we’ve become more scared. The damage caused is now hard to undo. But tonight on BBC-1, when Peter Snow explains how much of crime has dropped, many people (including several newspaper editors) may find it difficult to accept. The belief that crime is rising, not declining, is too engrained.

Don’t get me wrong. I am no apologist for criminals, nor for the government and nor am I remotely complacent about crime. Indeed, I have seen some of the worst of it, am outraged by the harm it does and devote much of my time and energy to tackling it. But crime is bad enough without stoking people’s fears. We need to think how we report crime. It is beset by a curious anti-intellectualism that would never be countenanced in the coverage of politics or international affairs. There are some first-class crime correspondents, sometimes in unexpected places (The Sun has run some creditably balanced stories, for example) but at least one has conceded to me that, as a breed, they are not renowned for their sophistication. Surely the answer lies in their own hands.

Crime is important. It helps define how we live our daily lives. It sets the tone for our society. It deserves better. So do the readers, listeners and viewers who cower in fear.

Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of a march that heralded the start of the Troubles. Nick Ross recalls his experiences as a student on the front line as Northern Ireland slid into bloodshed.

When I arrived at Queen’s University, Belfast seemed like a throw-back to generations past: in the swinging Sixties the children’s swings were chained up on the Sabbath. While Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are A’Changing, Belfast seemed the last place on earth that would be affected by the general air of turbulence abroad.

At the university’s halls of residence I quickly found myself baptised in the quaint prejudices of Northern Ireland. There was a polite pretence that religion didn’t matter, so no-one would say, ‘Hi, my name’s Jean and I’m a Catholic’. Instead there were sly strategies like name recognition or address-spotting, and only if all else failed would the question come: ‘What school did you go to?’ But knowing was important. Many people even seemed to think they could tell someone’s religion from the set of their eyes or the colour of their hair.

I was so fascinated by all this that as part of my course in psychology I chose for my thesis: Religious identification from static physiognomic cues in a sectarian social milieu – or, more prosaically, can you tell Protestants from Catholics just by looking? And don’t believe anything they (still) tell you. The answer, for all intents and purposes, is no.

Despite all the refined denials, sectarianism was at the heart of almost everything in Northern Ireland. Politics was measured by religion, not by left and right, so Protestants of all classes stuck together in a manner unimaginable in England, thus excluding Catholics from power. The result was that Northern Ireland had one-party rule for almost as long as the Soviet Union. And as with any one-party state, there was lots of paranoia. Opposition was seen as subversive.

Take, for example, the Special Powers Act, an emergency law from the 1920s still insisted on by Northern Ireland’s rulers in the 1960s at a time when the IRA was as irrelevant as animal rights activists are in Britain today. Under the Act you could be arrested without warrant, forcibly detained and compelled to answer questions, imprisoned without charge or trial, and flogged. If you died in custody the authorities could prohibit the holding of an inquest. Stalin would have approved.

To enforce this, consensual policing was not high on the agenda. The RUC is now a hugely reformed force, and even in the 1960s it was nothing like as one-sided as many Catholics made out – but the reservists, the B-Specials, were, by English standards, a one-sided paramilitary disgrace.

Protestants ran not just the police but the judiciary, the civil service, and most of the top jobs throughout the province. They therefore held the fate of Northern Ireland in their hands. In fact Whitehall had so washed its hands of Ireland, hoping never more to have to be involved, that Northern Ireland had virtual self-government, with an ostentatious parliament at Stormont, and with few of the constraints imposed on local politicians anywhere else. It had its own prime minister, as though it was a sovereign state.

So Northern Ireland Catholics, along with their grievances, were politically invisible. Until the year I got there, 1966, Unionists held all 12 of Ulster’s seats in the House of Commons. For local elections democracy was equally sub-standard.

This was not just theoretical injustice about who ran the town hall, for with control of local authorities came control of local authority housing. If any single issue was to trigger Northern Ireland’s troubles it was the ludicrously unfair allocation of council homes.

In August 1968, a particularly glaring piece of maladministration in a picturesque village called Caledon gave rise to Northern Ireland’s first march for civil rights.

A little cul de sac of 14 homes had been built and somehow Catholics had been led to expect they would get half of them. In the event all but one of them were allocated to Protestants. A large Catholic family, in desperate housing need, decided to squat, and eventually persuaded Austin Currie, a young Stormont MP, to join them. The case became a cause celebre, especially when, after the Catholics were evicted, the house was given to a single Protestant woman aged 19, a relative, it was said, of the mayor.

Currie approached a fledgling group called the Civil Rights Association (CRA) and a march was organised for 24 August 1968.

The Rev Ian Paisley proclaimed then, and still insists, that ‘CRA was just IRA with the ‘I’ turned around’, and other right-wing unionists like John Taylor still think so too, but they were hopelessly insensitive to the nuances of what was going on. The IRA was a pathetic rag-tag has-been outfit in the 1960s. But right from the start of the civil rights campaign its leaders saw an opportunity to reinvent the IRA – and every time unionists held out against reasonable reforms they played into the hands of their republican foes.

Another march was organised for six weeks later, this one in Londonderry. And this, for me, is the real start of the troubles October 5, 1968. Again, history defies the myths. If there was any single leading figure on this precipitous day, it certainly wasn’t a republican. Eamon McCann was, and is, a left-wing Labour man, and he planned a march which, he later confessed to me with a grin, was designed to cause a bit of trouble. It certainly did. The Civil Rights Association lent support but had little knowledge of Derry or the tribal boundaries there, and failed to understand that McCann’s provocative route would challenge Unionist supremacy in the city as never before.

On that Saturday afternoon police stopped the march with such ferocity that the TV pictures of flailing batons and broken heads made headlines throughout Britain and abroad. Four Westminster MPs were there – and one of them, Gerry Fitt, was streaming blood. Whitehall should by now have had an inkling that something was rotten in the state of Northern Ireland, but still they failed to see that the province was drifting into civil war.

On the Tuesday after that bloodshed in Londonderry, Queen’s University began its new academic term, and as students assembled we were outraged at the weekend’s police brutality. There was a great and seething meeting. We felt we had to show that civil rights was not about republicanism – and that if we marched peacefully we could make a stand against sectarianism as well as support the struggle for human rights.

Word spread quickly. A crowd of several hundred Paisleyites gathered ahead of us. Should we concede that Paisley could stop us, or should we try to break the cordon and risk a conflict which could lead to a breakdown of order across the city? I proposed that we take an alternative route. I lost.

So we set off, almost 2,000 of us, streaming from the students union building marching to the City Hall and heading for a confrontation. The police issued an order banning us from entering Shaftesbury Square. It was implied that if we followed an alternative route the RUC would do their best to get us through. Here in the street another vote was taken – and this time (by the narrowest of margins) the alternative route won.

We hardly got much further. Paisley had moved ahead of us, and we found ourselves blocked in Linenhall Street. We stood, we waited, and heard him bellowing, ‘We loyalists will never submit to the student-papist blackmail.’

The police again threw a cordon ahead of us, and so we sat down in the street and waited. For three hours we waited. Suddenly, after half the marchers had dispersed, there was a line of police, four deep with batons poised; pandemonium ensued. Then someone made a brilliant calming speech, and the remaining 600 traipsed back towards the campus singing We Shall Overcome. But the truth was, we’d been overcome. We felt in defeat.

The union was in great excitement, there were mass meetings, and that night a small group seized the moment. Imitating the French student movement that had almost brought down President de Gaulle they proposed a new organisation to fight for civil rights – one with no formal leadership. It became called the People’s Democracy, or plain PD. For weeks thereafter there were big student meetings. We were addressed by the Northern Ireland minister for education and by the local police chief, for we were plainly not a papish plot and nobody quite knew how to deal with us.

Soon there was another march. This time when I proposed the alternative route I was supported by another psychology student, a highly articulate young woman I had never met before but whose moderation instantly impressed me. Her name was Bernadette Devlin. Bernadette had never been involved in student politics before, but was suddenly caught up in the events and became politically inspired. She even went privately to meet Ian Paisley to try to convert him to the cause of civil rights. He told her to “march behind a Union jack”- a bit like asking a Scot to march behind the banner of St George – but we all knew had we done so he would have denounced us for sullying the flag.

With Devlin’s support I won, and this time we got through. And I recall when we got to the City Hall I found myself preaching to Paisley’s supporters. There was a large crowd barracking, and I was one of the few speakers whose voice was not drowned out by jeers – I suspect only because of my English accent. There was an odd respectfulness of English people then, and maybe they were curious to know what people from across the water were doing embroiled in what had seemed for years a private spat.

In London, now that Northern Ireland’s problems were as plain as a poke in the eye, the media began to get involved. Until now they had neither looked nor cared, and were as ignorant and surprised at the trouble as their readers, listeners and viewers. In November Captain O’Neill was called to Downing Street by Harold Wilson, who demanded reforms. But O’Neill had nothing to offer – he later complained he was left ‘naked’ at the meeting, sabotaged by the two colleagues who went with him: his ambitious deputy Brian Faulkner and the extreme right-winger Bill Craig.

Changes were forced upon them – but Wilson got it hopelessly wrong, setting the tone for a generation of British political leaders who failed to grapple properly with Northern Ireland. Whitehall knew next to nothing, hardly surprising given the media silence. There was only one official responsible for the province, with a desk in the attic of the Home Office. His portfolio also included the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles.

Wilson produced the first of many Whitehall fudges, unable to keep out of it, but unwilling to get involved, and putting pressure on Northern Ireland politicians to deliver what was simply beyond them. The fudge was to prove fatal, with O’Neill trying to implement reforms at a pace that was just enough to humiliate and infuriate one side, but not enough to mollify the other. The political temperature began to race. Protestant extremists began to demonstrate, and members of O’Neill’s cabinet conspired against him. The fudge was to prove fatal, with Terence O’Neill trying to implement reforms at a pace that was just enough to humiliate and infuriate one side, but not enough to mollify the other. The political temperature began to race. Protestant extremists began to demonstrate, and members of O’Neill’s cabinet conspired against him. O’Neill made a dramatic appeal: “Ulster,” he warned, “is at the cross roads.”

With reforms on offer, the civil rights leadership agreed to halt the marches. At Queen’s University the great majority of students were relieved and agreed to abide by the moratorium. But one person in particular either couldn’t see the danger, or didn’t care. He vowed to keep the pressure on.

Just before Christmas in 1968 a graduate called Michael Farrell proposed a ‘long march’ from Belfast to Londonderry. I attended one of the mass meetings that voted overwhelmingly against the plan, and I went back to London for Christmas secure in the knowledge that at least the civil rights movement would not undermine O’Neill.

However, I had underestimated the anarchic nature of the People’s Democracy. After the holidays had started and most students had gone home a further meeting was called, attended by only a handful of people, and the march was reinstated. On New Year’s Day 1969 Michael Farrell and 40 students set out on the journey, knowing it was provocative and expecting to encounter trouble. They did.

Out in the countryside at a bend in the road where a bridge crosses a stream, a place called Burntollet, right-wing opponents had set an ambush. A rain of rocks and stones poured down on the marchers, and several of them finished up in hospital.

It was not only the civil rights students who walked into a trap – the Loyalists did too, a political trap that would ensnare them and their beloved Province for 30 years. For once the tone of violence had been set it couldn’t be defused. The march regrouped and its numbers swelled as news spread about Burntollet. When at last they arrived in Derry more stones were thrown, fighting started, and now it got out of control. Battles went on throughout the night, barricades went up, and at daybreak no-one took them down.

Farrell still defends the march, and has stayed true to the cause of civil rights (he now runs Liberty, a civil rights group, in Dublin), but some of the moving forces behind PD are now pillars of respectability. PD activists were not the republican extremists that unionists saw under the bed. There is, though, one notable exception.

Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey), whom I had so admired for her tenacious but temperate views, has since travelled deep into paramilitary politics, and it is a journey I have never understood. She herself confesses she is not sure how it happened. What I do know is that in early 1969 PD decided to put up candidates for election to parliament, not with any hope of winning but to qualify for free postage and for publicity, and Bernadette shone out. In April 1969, aged 21, she became Britain’s youngest MP and made news around the world. Her fame led her to be invited to the USA where she was made an Honorary Black Panther, and from there her path into militancy was steep.

Meanwhile, Terence O’Neill was still surrounded by people with antediluvian, unreconstructed views. Unionists MPs began to call openly for his dismissal. On the very day Bernadette Devlin made her maiden speech in the House of Commons, O’Neill resigned.

During the Spring of 1969 the Unionists fractured – and so did the civil rights campaign. In both camps, moderates and hard-liners were struggling for control. In both, hard-liners won. That summer, when I went back to England for the holidays, the province began to fall out badly. When I got back to Belfast for my final academic term a deputation came to see me from the students union. Would I be prepared to stand as union deputy president at a time when the whole place was a tinderbox?

I postponed my finals for a year – and within days of taking up office fighting broke out in the university itself. All small fry compared to mounting violence in the real world beyond the university, though. But what had started as a reasonable protest for political reforms was now a struggle to suppress a full-scale civil war.

From this point on the story of the troubles is well-rehearsed and simply depressing. Nature abhors a vacuum and two years after the troubles started the IRA really did appear – in the form of the Provos, with a pedigree that is deeply antidemocratic, contemptuous of the majority views of Irish men and women, quite unable to come to terms with the fact that Unionists are Irish too, and certainly incompetent at winning them over.

So the Unionist self-fulfilling prophecy was at last fulfilled – the IRA did return. As for why they quickly found such fertile ground, look again to Whitehall. In its staggering incompetence it placed control of the troops in the hands of Stormont.

The very people there whose sectarianism had brought Northern Ireland to the brink now had the British army to play with. The result is that the army was used foolishly, antagonising Catholic communities and ultimately in enforcing a monstrously stupid policy of internment without trial.

If it was intended to reduce violence it predictably had the opposite effect. And what came with it was deeply corrosive to principles of law, justice, and civility. Internees were tortured.

Right from the start elements of the security forces were acting shamefully and elements of government were either conspiring with them or covering things up. Later in the troubles this mix of immorality, hypocrisy, lying and straight incompetence would lead, literally, to British terrorism. It may not have been official policy, but as a senior military spokesman later admitted after he’d retired, British agents were implicated in a murderous bombing campaign in Dublin. Nobody in authority has ever denied his shameful allegations.

But it was the day to day behaviour of some of the troops that was so dismal. Senior officers, journalists and government ministers were naïve and complacent about the extent of army brutality in the early 1970s.

In 1972, after I’d graduated and was working as a freelance reporter, I came across a story that was simply compelling – I had interviewed a wonderfully courageous Catholic woman who had saved the life of a wounded soldier trapped in a block of flats on the Falls Road. That Christmas I got a card from her, implying she wouldn’t do it again. Had she been intimidated by the Provos? No, a friend of hers had been beaten by the army.

The army produced its orthodox response – ‘it isn’t true’. But after I persisted they unwisely let me interview the commanding officer of the regiment involved. ‘Truth being stranger than fiction,’ he said, ‘he was hit by a swinging door. Quite hard I’m afraid. But my chaps picked him up, dusted him off and sent him on his way.’

Such was the gullibility of the time, such was the desire to believe the best of the troops in Northern Ireland, that when we broadcast the item, many people seemed to believe the army’s version.

That year, 1972, I left Northern Ireland – the place that had become my home for six turbulent years – a place I’d come to identify with and love. But small-minded politicians had by now created a murderous balance of power – a macabre stability in which too many people had a stake in perpetuating the vicious status quo. Catholics no longer had to cope with an unbridled Protestant ascendancy; unionists believed they were winning a battle against moves to unite Ireland; and Whitehall had by then at least contained the violence. No-one had peace, but everyone had their second best option.

If only our media had done their job and sounded the alert long before it all exploded; if only Whitehall had taken over early instead of procrastinating; if only control of security had not been given to Stormont; if only the army had been better trained in policing. I was frustrated that the Establishment had played into the hands of the IRA; contemptuous of London’s ridiculous belief that if it simply held the ring then a reasonable compromise could eventually be found. And to be honest I was ashamed that I and people like me, the wet liberals who had no tribal commitments to either side, had allowed the militants to seize the upper hand.