2011 UK Census to be neutered

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 10 July 2010 09:06.

The coalition government, in its search for economies, is in the process of deciding to scrap the Office for National Statistics’ ten-yearly household census. It favours a piecemeal approach based on public and private databases.

... critics raised concerns that the new methods will fail to provide the same detailed picture of the nation’s population, religion and social habits and described the decision as regrettable and a terrible mistake.

... Geoffrey Robertson QC, a constitutional barrister, said the news was ‘regrettable’ because since some sort of count had been carried out by the monarch or government of Britain for more than 1,000 years.

‘Future historians will be less able to interpret Britain as a result of this decision — maybe that is the reason for it.’

David Green, a director of the Civitas think tank, called the decision ‘a terrible mistake’.

‘It is a question of whether the alternatives are reliable. The census is expensive but I think it is worth the money for the historic continuity.’

Next year’s national Census cannot be stopped, but will be subject to unspecified economies. The implications for the content of the questionnaire, which currently allows “whites” to specify their ethnicity, the first box in this section being “English - Welsh - Scottish - Northern Irish - British”, and for the resultant database, due to be available from the middle of 2012, is now uncertain. Thereafter, it is difficult to see how information on ethnicity can be extracted from other databases. Country of birth, yes, but racial origin, no. The process of replacement cannot be accurately measured without that information, and that does not help us at all.

Tags: Demographics

Comments:

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:57 | #

Dasein,

Many thanks - obviously I missed that in my rush to get something new on the page. I have now corrected it, and contextualised the 2011 Census within the planned changes.

Posted by Dan Dare on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:41 | #

I think that Dasein is correct and that the real purpose of discontinuing the census is to phase out the collection of statistics on race and ethnicity at a national level.

The 2011 census is likely to expose to the public gaze what we here already know, and the reaction is bound to be one of shock and horror amongst the unawakened. This will be viewed by the elites as counter-productive and not in the interests of ‘community cohesion’.

Posted by Dan Dare on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:01 | #

The accumulation of statistics on race and ethnicity is deprecated at the EU level as well, there is no central source that collates such information even though Eurostat seems to require national governments to report on everything under the sun (except that). It does issue periodic reports on the numbers of non-EU citizens resident in each member state, but that’s it.

Germany hasn’t run a national census since 1987, although it will participate in the EU-wide census next year. I believe this will be based on small-scale ‘statistically relevant’ samples though and not a full-scale house-by-house census.

I will try to locate a copy of the EU questionnaire for our inspection but given what we already know I don’t expect to be a useful source for data on race and ethinicity.

It seems that nobody wants to know.

Posted by Dan Dare on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:12 | #

It didn’t take long to turn up the relevant EU directive.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2008:218:0014:0020:EN:PDF

As anticipated, there is no requirement on national governments to report on race or ethicity in its returns to the EU, and member states are free to use a variety of sampling techniques.

Posted by Angry Beard on Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:31 | #

Every nation worthy of the name conducts at least a decennial census.
- It’s simply the most vital statistic any nation state can muster, more vital in fact than its acerage.
Even the most raggedy-arse, fly-blown third world states can manage to conduct a census.Britain apparently cannot.
Anyway, it’ll be a blow to family historians of the future trying to discern their roots, as GW said that’s probably the whole idea.