Manifesto

By Clarissa Mornay

It began, appropriately, at 4:57 a.m. — that most sacred of hours when night begins its slow capitulation to dawn — and it ended, if indeed it can be said to have ended, at some indeterminate time when guests began earnestly debating whether the concept of “midnight” should be abolished entirely.

The Dawn Liberation Front, those fiery opponents of the biannual clock mutilation known as the end of British Summer Time, hosted their inaugural fundraising soirée this weekend at the Pimlico Wilde Pavilion, under the banner “The Gala for the Unsetting Sun.”

And what a scene it was. If the Suffragettes had met the Bloomsbury Group at a Nineties rave — with a hint of TED Talk — it might have looked something like this.

Dress Code: Chronological Rebellion

Guests were encouraged to wear “temporal defiance.” The result was a thrilling spectacle of metaphorical millinery: one attendee arrived in a full solar-themed gown made entirely of reflective insulation foil (“a wearable sunrise,” she insisted); another wore an enormous cardboard clock on his chest with the hands permanently fixed at 7:12 a.m.

The noted philosopher and DLF patron Dr. Horatio Fall declared that “the true enemy of civilisation is standardisation,” before dramatically throwing his wristwatch into the punch bowl. Applause rippled through the crowd like early morning light on water. Moments later, another guest was seen with their hand in the punch — “it was vintage Cartier,” she explained sheepishly.

The Programme: Equal Parts Poetry and Protest

The evening (or morning?) unfolded according to what organisers called a “circadian flow,” meaning no formal schedule, only “emergent moments of alignment.”

At approximately sunrise, DLF co-founder and chair, Dr. Lucinda Merrow, took to the podium — a Perspex lectern filled with sand “to represent the tyranny of the hourglass.” Her speech was a rallying cry:

“We are diurnal beings, not bureaucratic metronomes!

We do not fall back — we blaze forward!

Time belongs to the sun, not the spreadsheet!”

She was interrupted only by the spontaneous ringing of several antique alarm clocks, hidden in the crowd by volunteers in orange boiler suits.

Later, a troupe of interpretive dancers known as The Chrononauts performed a piece entitled “The Murder of Morning,” during which they solemnly dragged an enormous papier-mâché sun down a ramp while chanting “Not in our time!” Several onlookers were moved to tears.

Culinary and Cocktail Innovations

Unusually, the catering was chronologically thematic. The bar offered drinks such as Bloody Meridian, Perpetual Spritz, and the now infamous Five O’Clock Somewhere Martini. Canapés included “eggs of awakening” (devilled quail eggs served on miniature clock faces) and “inverted time” (upside-down tarte Tatin served before the starters).

At one point, a waiter confided that the kitchen had run on Solar Time rather than GMT, leading to a 47-minute delay in the dessert course. This was universally praised as a “philosophically consistent” act of resistance.

Guests of Note

Among the attendees were the artist Anselm Duquesne, who unveiled his new installation Daylight Robbery — a vast pseudo-mirror reflecting only the first hint of sunrise — and the television historian Petra Wicks, who declared in her speech that “the invention of daylight saving was the most grievous act against the British people since Cromwell banned Christmas.”

Also present: a minor royal “in a private capacity,” several exhausted-looking chronobiologists, and one member of Parliament who, when asked for comment, muttered, “I was told this was a charity breakfast with floating voters.”

Closing Moments

As the event drew to a close — sometime near brunch — a hush fell over the gathering. The assembled crowd, facing east, raised their glasses as Dr. Merrow led the closing chant:

“Zero, one, two, three, GMT is fine with me!”

The chant crescendoed into laughter, then song, as a jazz trio launched into a rousing version of Here Comes the Sun. Someone released a helium balloon shaped like a pocket watch. It rose, slowly, silently, until it was indistinguishable from the clouds above. The party ended with loud shouts of “No turning back!

Postscript: The Movement Gathers Pace

Membership of the DLF reportedly tripled overnight, though critics pointed out that “overnight” may soon be an outlawed concept within the movement.

In the words of one departing guest, clutching a souvenir badge inscribed with the DLF motto — No Turning Back — “Wonderful, it wasn’t so much a party as a philosophical sunrise. I for one will miss these meetings if we ever do manage to abolish BST.”

THE TWILIGHT CONSPIRACY: Why the Clocks Must Never Go Back Again

By Camden Preedy, Founder of the Dawn Liberation Front, a Movement for the Preservation of Human Dawn.

Let us say it plainly: the turning back of clocks each autumn — this barbaric, bureaucratic ritual, this calendrical vandalism — is an act of civilisational sabotage. It is an offence against light, against life, against the fragile spiritual economy of modern existence. When we submit, meekly, to this twice-yearly horological mutiny — “spring forward, fall back,” as if recited by sheep — we enact not a practical adjustment but a small, genteel apocalypse.

I am here not merely to complain but to declare war. The clocks must never go back again.

The Tyranny of Dusk

What is this nonsense of “saving daylight” as though photons were a commodity, to be banked and withdrawn like some celestial currency? Daylight cannot be saved. It is spent the instant it appears — in golden beams across breakfast tables, in glimmers on the edge of the commuter’s coffee, in the pale, defiant light that insists that life, despite everything, continues.

And yet, every October, the state — that most officious of timekeepers — having stolen an hour of our evening hands it back as if doing us a favour. We are told it’s for our safety, our productivity, our circadian health. Lies. Lies all. The true purpose is control. It is the domestication of time itself — a bureaucrat’s fantasy of power over the heavens.

Consider Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, or Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. These are paintings not of time’s measurement but of time’s feeling — the shimmer of temporality as lived experience. Imagine if Turner had to paint under fluorescent lamplight at 4:30 p.m. because the government had decreed the night shall begin early. What then of art? Of hope? Of sanity?

Philosophers Against the Clock

Kant, that punctual Prussian, thought the moral law within and the starry heavens above were twin proofs of reason’s order. But he never had to attend a 5 p.m. meeting in pitch darkness. Heidegger, meanwhile, spoke of being-toward-death — but I suspect even he might have reconsidered his ontology had he faced the annual descent into artificial gloom engineered by some parliamentary committee in 1916.

And Nietzsche? Oh, Nietzsche would have howled. He who said “Become who you are” would surely add: “And keep your damn clocks where they are!” The eternal recurrence was meant to be metaphysical, not meteorological.

The Psychological Wreckage

Every year, millions plunge into what psychologists euphemistically call “seasonal affective disorder.” Let’s call it what it is: state-induced melancholy. When the clocks fall back, so do we — into lethargy, into despair, into the psychic equivalent of damp socks.

What is this but an act of sanctioned cruelty? The body expects dusk at six, and instead receives it at five. Our inner chronometers rebel, our serotonin dwindles, and we become pale shadows of our summer selves. Even the houseplants, those stoic companions, seem to slump in protest.

A Modest Proposal (That Should Be Taken Very Seriously)

I hereby launch The Dawn Liberation Front — a grassroots movement to Abolish the Fall-Back Forever.

No more tampering with the sun. No more calendar tyranny. Let us reclaim the light that is rightfully ours, let us wrench our wrists free from the manacles of mechanical deceit.

We shall wear tiny lapel ribbons as a symbol of resistance. We shall host candlelit vigils (ironically, yes, but passionately) on the night the clocks would have changed. We shall write to our MPs, our HR departments, our vicars; whoever must be told.

Let the message be clear and thunderous:

“We will not fall back. We will only rise.”

A Final Plea

Time, as Augustine knew, is a mystery. But it is our mystery, not one to be meddled with by ministers. When we move the clock hands backward, we enact a kind of spiritual regression — a symbolic retreat from the horizon of possibility.

Enough. Let the clock stand firm in its honest ticking. Let evening arrive when it must, not when the state decrees.

So join me, brothers and sisters. Join The Dawn Liberation Front. Together, we shall keep the light alive.

Because to turn back the clock is not simply to adjust an hour — it is to betray the day itself.