Oh the irony to live in Greenwich and not be in GMT. When will the government stop messing around with time?

Not the government's fault.
That was down to the Rest of the World giving the"bird" to the now defunct British Empire.

A quick(??) history lesson is required:
First suggested in the early 1900s so that someone could get more time on the golf course after work!!!!
BST (then British Daylight Saving Time) was introduced during the 1str World War as an effort to improve the efficiency of British manufacturing & farming. It worked (sort of).
During World War 2 the clocks were moved two hours instead of one, for the same excuse.
And then we were stuck with this pattern, just because.....
Until about 2010 just about every European country including the UK had its own set of dates "to keep things (not) simple". So the dates of change were synchronised.
Meanwhile the USA did its own thing, and China sticks with one time zone and no fiddling with the clocks.
It's been a perennial debate as to the pros and cons of such time tampering, although recent evidence does suggest that it is a complete waste of time and money. Who knows, one day sanity may return and the UK will stick with good old GMT. It's interesting to note that International air traffic uses GMT almost universally wherever in the world, but the public flight schedules normally show local time.

Greenwich Mean Time itself was only brought into domestic (as opposed to scientific) use to make railway timetables work: before that need arose, each city and town used their own local solar time.

The synchronisation of European summer / winter shifts was done for much the same reason: an entire international rail journey could keep to a stable timetable, without blocks of stations shifting an hour back and forth relative to their neighbours.

On another subject, it is somewhat ironic that a bunch of Conservative cabinet ministers got their way by withdrawing their labour.

Until about 2010 just about every European country including the UK had its own set of dates "to keep things (not) simple".

In the 70s of the last century there was an energy crisis, which meant petroleum was in shortage with elevated prices. Summer time was then reintroduced in a lot of European countries to save on energy, so that people and factories would put on their machines and lights later and they wouldn't need lights in the early morning as the sun was already up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis

I remember when I was a kid (about 35-40 years ago) Thatcher (I think) reduced the "national speed limit" to 50 from 60 to "save petrol", even though 56 is the well established efficient speed[1]. Everyone ignored it.

Oh dear so many things wrong in that one line
Actually nearly 50 years ago in 1974, under the Conservative PM Ted Heath (OK, you did say "think" against the PM)
The national Speed limit was reduced from 70 mph to 50mph.
No, it's an unproven claim that 56mph is the best for economy. What that figure is an aggregated average mpg for a small selection cars, tested under laboratory conditions about 40 years ago. Actually it's even worse than that, it goes back to the days when the fuel consumption figures were obtained under "urban" conditions (average of about 25mph?), 56mph and 75mph, no intermediate speeds, no weather conditions, no allowances for gradients to be taken into account. So, total hog wash.
Not everyone ignored it, plod had an absolute field day with speeders, and people knew that there were posses of plod bikes and cars roaming around. Most did moan about it.

Power loss from air resistance isn't linear apparently.

The air resistance is called 'Drag' and the formula for calculating drag has the term v^2 (v - velocity) in it.

So every time you double your speed the drag (air resistance) quadruples

There are a couple of curves to consider when looking are the fuel efficiency of cars.
The most obvious is the drag, which is a fairly simple V^2 law.
The other is the engine efficiency curve. This is far from simple and is generally at its peak near maximum torque, so when plotted against road speed it is a series of curves, one for each gear. For many common cars the gearing is set such that one gear is pretty close to this engine speed in a "typical urban environment", i.e. about 30mph/80kph; another gear is set for "country roads", at about 50mph/80kph; and top gear for motorway speeds say about 70mph/120kph. Of course in these days of computer controlled engines the manufacturers can alter the engine tuning to suit the driving pattern (but this is not an instant switch, rather a progression between states).
There is a third resistance curve - the "rolling resistance" or mechanical resistance, and this is generally fairly linear and for most modern cars is fairly low. It is affected primarily by tyre drag, road surface temperature, gear and bearing drag.

For most common car types the manufacturers will have set the gearing for the expected normal duty for a car, thus a city car will have everything optimised around nipping around town at the expense of motorway work, while a larger car will be more optimised for long constant speed runs on the motorways at the expense of crawling around town.

In my part of the world to drive at a constant speed you will be constantly accelerating/braking and probably changing gears as well.
Non of this flat road, fixed throttle position, that's very boring.

Sorry about the paywall, can't find it on a sensible newspaper.

Story was covered on BBC Today programme on Radio4 yesterday morning.

Sorry about the paywall, can't find it on a sensible newspaper.

Story was covered on BBC Today programme on Radio4 yesterday morning.

He said sensible. Of course that means sensible to him and thus is far more revealing of himself that anything else.

A quick search found it here: Don’t leave war refugees languishing on a cruise ship

Looks like it's going to be standing room only in the UK before long.