On Sat, 21 Aug 2004 14:10:11 +0100, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message , at 10:27:07 on
Sat, 21 Aug 2004, Peter Sumner
remarked:
Any real pedant would know that in the vicinity of the zero meridian
we stopped using GMT - based on astronomical time in 1972 and switched
(after failing to agree the defining language for its TLA with the
French) to UTC - based on atomic time.

Depends who "we" are. It would seem that official time as defined by UK
legislation is still GMT (aka UT1).

The official time in the UK is maintained by the NPL and it ticks
atomic seconds in UTC. This is what happens in practice as you can
tell by the addition of leap seconds, which show plainly as an extra
'pip' in the time signals. If we were using GMT these leap seconds
would not be required. For pedants there is a good explanation at
http://www.npl.co.uk/time/leap_second.html.

Our legislators have mistakenly ignored this and still pretend that
GMT is in use. Not that the maximum error of 0.9 sec makes much
difference to the man on the Clapham omnibus



--
Peter Sumner