Returning The Census

Having been reminded, several times, about the 2011 Census Return, I thought it was about time to see what many are complaining about. After three minutes careful study, my suggested use being rejected on hygiene grounds, I realised that the thing could be done on the machine.

Being inclined to do more daft things online, like so many others, I fitted it in between the analysis of the day’s cartoons and the latest forecasts of the TEOTWAWKI to lighten the mood. So now I am listed forever as a hunter-gatherer sun worshipper.

This is probably more reliable than most of the returns they will get. I suspect that the scale of bad returns this time is likely to dwarf those of previous years and those seemingly sound will be littered with errors or falsehoods. As in 2001 in some districts the size and nature of the discrepancies will be very large indeed.

Also online are the old Census returns up to 1911 which have radically reduced the time and cost of looking into the past and not only for personal family history. It means that it is possible to do other things quickly and simply.

On my travels yesterday I picked up an Evening Standard, the weekly one which also had the property pages. Flicking through them to wonder at the figures, I saw a property in Twickenham not far from a place I know and the station. A three bedroom terrace house, no garage, good condition, is priced at fifty quid short of £600,000.

It is not exactly posh by any means, under the flight path for Heathrow and with a traffic system in the area that is very congested. The local shopping is not very good and other facilities very average, unless you like attending Rugby internationals or support Harlequins.

Days before I had seen a street in Liverpool on the TV, one I knew well but this one was boarded up for demolition apart from a couple of properties occupied by aged pensioners with nowhere to go and no money. Those houses had zero value.

Thank you Lord Prescott and all your chums in the property trade for creating all those wonderful schemes for “urban regeneration” that have ruined the lives of so many. These houses were very similar in type to the one in Twickenham and arguably the local facilities were better.

So I look at another place, Jarrow, for those with an interest in Labour history. It was not difficult to find another house of the same type. This one is still in a functioning residential area, modernised and costs around £120,000, possibly a top price for that sort given the work done on it.

Then I check out the 1911 Census for those streets and look at the entries of the inhabitants. There are many people listed in that Census that I knew well. Also, unlike the bare descriptions of trade because of this I am familiar with the nuances of status and income that are implied. Some I knew will have been in their forty’s so well on in life and work.

In both Liverpool and Jarrow the families living in the streets were of the lower middling/upper working orders, essentially supervisory and higher skilled. Most will have had regular or reliable incomes. Most I suspect will have been in the Senior Classes of the then Elementary Schools and with the others had some kind of trade training or apprenticeship.

Down in Twickenham it was not the same. They had decent working class jobs and varied in type but their income level and skills would have been a little below those of the others. This would fit with the economic structure of the period. Also it suggests that the rentals may well have been lower.

Moreover, I knew these districts in the 1950’s and can recall the situation then. By that time the shift in favour of values in the South had begun to appear. But to look at the divergence now in 2011 is to ask the obvious questions about just how wide the difference is and why?

One is that the dead hand of government mingled with high finance has wrecked the centre of Liverpool. In Jarrow they have not got around to that patch but the values still reflect housing for the more middling orders. But why have the costs in Twickenham gone so very high in comparison?

What it tells me is that there is something very unstable and wrong about the UK economy and Osborne’s budget is not going to do much about it.

Counting Out The Census

The announcement that the Census of Population in the form that it has taken since 1841 is now to end is not a surprise. According to a report I have seen the 2011 is said to be going ahead and that will be the last. I recommend that the Government should cancel that for 2011. It is all too likely to turn out to be a farce, grossly inaccurate, very expensive and a source of unlimited trouble and complaint at a time when many more serious issues have to be dealt with. Also by the time the data becomes available and has had analysis it will be out of date.

After the 2001 Census there were difficulties in a number of areas, notably Westminster of all places, where the gross figures for the Returns simply did not match other information which was more reliable and able to be checked. Because the Census was used as a base for major funding and planning decisions by Whitehall those authorities concerned stood to lose a great deal and their council tax payers to lose even more. I did a piece at the time and was delighted to see the Government back track in its attitude and accept that there could be major inaccuracies in the data for a variety of reasons.

In the past the Census was always a rough and ready population count asking for basic information and intended as a framework for discussing general population issues. It was never intended to have an absolute authority in a whole range of government decision making processes on planning and funding. For any of this there were a large range of other reports and investigations available. In many local areas Sanitary Engineers, Medical Officers and others worked to find out the facts.

Those of the past for those who have studied Census Returns extensively know all too well that they were never accurate and the detail is strewn with errors, wrong information, and often guesswork. It was not unknown for the recording to rank bad in some cases and very unreliable in others. Some patches of the urban areas were not covered at all for the obvious reasons; no go is nothing new.

Seamen necessarily are often missing. There were many others who travelled and itinerants and work gangs left off. Men would sleep out for the night because they believed that to be recorded meant being called for the Militia. One of the most spectacular errors was in 1881 when the wife of a Foreign Office Plenipotentiary-General negotiating a Treaty abroad in the name of The Queen and Parliament was listed as a the wife of a General Labourer. The enumerator did not appreciate the distinctions in the use of the word “General”.

If 2001 in my view was poor and ramshackle on the whole, with a form that many will have disliked, then 2011 will be worse and for much the same reasons. The intention is to ask many more questions of people who will be very reluctant either to tell the truth or to co-operate. I have seen some Libertarian and other internet stuff already that is suggesting that people give silly answers. Few will need much invitation, will those who worship Jedi suddenly became the major religion of the UK?

In the past there have been more serious conceptual weaknesses in the analysis of the Returns. Because they relied on the old Registrar General’s construct of the class structure this was the way population was regarded. The fluidity of movement, the complex structure of families and critically the nature of management and organisational systems often bears no relationship to the bareness of the Returns. I could go on and on about the way the old Returns gave only a crude and inadequate snapshot and must never be taken at face value either in detail or as a whole.

One reason is that too many historians, sociologists and others have imposed too many inadequate and misleading ideologies of politics and philosophy on these raw figures. So we have been given a wholly deceptive picture of the past. The 2011 Census will be no better, probably much worse given the potential scale of evasion. The old Returns have their uses but like any evidence of the past or even the present need regarding with care and corroboration.

Anyhow if anybody wants to know who I am or what I am they just have to look at what is out there already in the computers. If as Kant is alleged to have suggested, “Man is what he eats” then it is all there in the shopping lists.

So the government should scrap the 2011 Census and save themselves a lot of trouble and all the bother of making sense of what is too likely to be nonsense.