I usually wake at 5.30, which is earlier than I like but gives me two uninterrupted hours of work before the day begins. However, at the end of the month the government will make me wake at 4.30, which I find miserably early. Then, when I have grown used to treating 4.30 as 5.30, the government will next April tell me to wake at 6.30. This is crazy. If lighter evenings are a good idea in the summer, why not in the winter, when there is less light and when the contentious northern mornings are dark anyway?

For many people I know, perhaps even for most, sleep is their biggest bugbear. Night-time torments them. They cannot sleep without addictive pills, or suffer broken nights, or wake too early, or are tortured by the cries of babies, the snores of partners or the rowdyism of neighbours. They change mattresses, read novels, punch pillows, jog, drink whisky, count sheep, make love, anything to find sleep. All the therapies in the world seem unable to chart a path from consciousness to Shakespeare's "death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, the balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course".

So why does government make things worse by constantly shortening the pleasure or prolonging the pain? Why keep the nation in a state of perpetual jet lag? The home secretary, whom I take to be responsible, is like a demented regimental sergeant major, asserting authority by ordering the company on parade to perform something stupid.

British summer time is no ancient tradition but, like many dictatorial novelties, a creature of war. It was proposed in 1915 by a house-builder, William Willett, to give himself an extra hour to play golf, and was taken up by Winston Churchill to save coal during the great war. Since the benefit, at least to golfers, weakened in October, "real time" was resumed for the winter, even if it meant lighting-up time was earlier.

Since then, the annual changing of the clocks has become one of the ritual persecutions that government visits on citizens as if to atone for original sin – like airport security, criminal record checks and quarterly VAT returns. When I questioned a Heathrow guard on his need to body-search an old man in a wheelchair, he turned political philosopher: "It's just to show who's boss."

The Wilson government briefly ended the changing of the clocks in 1968 and experimented with three years of standard time. The Scots lobbied to end it, fighting for a reversion to dark afternoons on the basis of suspect accident figures, to punish the English for making them live so far north. Though the statistics were complicated by a simultaneous change in drink-driving law, 1,000-2,000 deaths and serious injuries were saved by lighter evenings. It patently made sense to maximise the amount of daylight available for work and play by the maximum number of people. Standard time, of GMT-plus-one, tallied with safety, energy conservation, recreation and the appreciation of beauty. It also conformed to the rest of western Europe.

Reversing the gains of standard time would normally have caused apoplexy to health-and-safety. Yet the slaughter was regarded by the Scots as a necessary blood sacrifice to the forces of Presbyterian gloom. Despite a clear preference by English people for standard time, Scots MPs have filibustered every subsequent attempt in parliament to restore it. To them, God-fearing (Scottish) people deserved lighter mornings than evenings, when there was a danger of such licentious behaviour as people walking in parks after work, playing football or enjoying the open air.

The Scots should be left to do what they want with their clocks. It is their business. If it causes problems along the border, they are ones that are solved with equanimity between the time zones of Russia, America and Australia. But in this matter the London dog is wagged by the Edinburgh tail. The concession to opinion north of the border was driven largely by English anti-devolution sentiment, clock-changing being a price thought worth paying (in death and destruction) to keep the union together.

When people worked by hand, they did so in daylight and slept in darkness. In his intriguing new history of the night, Evening's Empire, Craig Koslofsky points out that "nocturnalisation" arrived when idle pleasures moved from day to evening, largely as a sign of wealth. Night was traditionally associated with wrongdoing, evil, the devil and witchcraft. When most people could not afford clocks or oil lamps to show the passage of time, night was full of insomniac terror. The sleepless did not know how long they might have to lie awake before the salvation of dawn. Nor, thanks to the mumbo-jumbo of dream-readers (and later of Freud), did they know what horrors might be revealed if they returned to slumber. John Donne regarded midnight as the moment when the atheist should arise alone, "hear God and ask then … is there a God? And, if thou darest, say no."

This changed with the 17th century, when houses and streets were lit, clocks became widespread, indoors enjoyment was safe and exclusive, and revelry could extend into the night. To stay up late became smart and risqué, if unproductive. Night was when the gains of the day were frittered away, when the gap between rich and poor widened. The rich going home would pass the poor going to work.

Nowadays the divide is as much between young and old. It is known that older people and those charged with adrenaline, such as Margaret Thatcher, need less sleep. The columnist Bernard Levin wrote of his foolproof cure for insomnia, which was to get up. The former prime minister John Major used to read the first editions of the morning papers before going to bed, ensuring himself a miserable night and an equally miserable awakening. Teenagers, as every parent knows, are mutating into vampires, sleeping by day and roaming the streets by night. They seem unable to rise from their beds when the sun is high, or close their eyes in hours of darkness.

We remain ambivalent about the night. We equate retiring early to bed with virtue, with making us "healthy, wealthy and wise". The workaholic Benjamin Franklin remarked that the early morning "has gold in its mouth". We declare an hour of sleep before midnight to be worth two after it, and regard a good night as "the sleep of the just".

Yet we accept such inanities as putting the clocks back in October as if it were a hallowed medieval ceremony, an autumn ritual of reaping, harvesting, filling barns and raking dead leaves. Changing the time terminates the summer and its pleasures with darkness at teatime. It bids us go home and care for our own. It is a relic of the austerity of war, like rationing, Dad's Army and utility clothes, but one that was never carried to its logical conclusion, that Greenwich mean time was always an hour behind. Because government said clock-changing was good, it was assumed to be so, even if it is totally mad.