Sunday Thinkpiece: what were you doing on the night...?

What will you be doing on the night of 27th March? It is a month away and you should be making your plans. Will you be out celebrating the crowning of Robert the Bruce in Scotland in 1306? The declaration of the Crimean War in 1854? The surrender of Geronimo in 1886? Or the birthday of singers Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas?

If so, be careful what you get up to. For 27th March is the day of the decennial census in the UK, and if you return home with someone you have met on your revels make sure before going to bed to record his or her name and ethnic grouping (if you are a bit bleary eyed you can just ask this – ‘are you black, white, Asian or some sort of mixture?’ – it often helps break the ice). For the State wants to know. And the State wants to know if that person usually lives there.

They will know it is a one night stand. And yes, I mean you.

The 1991 census asked 34 questions; the 2001 asked 41 questions; this time there are 14 about the household, 43 about individuals and 4 about visitors. They want to know the address of your employer and how you get to work; whether you have risen to the rank of supervisor. They want to know what sort of qualifications you have, down to ‘O’ levels and GCSEs. They want to know if you can speak English, what your religion is and where you were living last year. Where were you born? How is your health? What is your legal, marital or same sex civil partnership status?

In the 2001 census, 390,127 people registered their religion as Jedi Knight, more than for Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism. Now they don’t just want to know if you are a Jedi Knight, they want to know if you have shacked up with one.

The cost of this Big Brotherfest is put at £500 million (it will be more, of course, things done by Government and involving computers are usually double the estimate). This figure is in part because they are translating it into 56 languages (don’t forget one of the questions is ‘do you speak English’) including, presumably, Jedi. But I am not so worried about that – the Ministry of Defence wastes sums like that on an almost weekly basis.

What I am worried about is why the State wants this information and what they are going to do with it. Why do they want to know whether I am Scottish, a gypsy or Irish traveller (only if white) or ‘mixed White and black Caribbean’? According to the Office of National Statistics, the census ‘provides population statistics from a national to neighbourhood level for government, local authorities, business and communities.’ So all this personal stuff is going to be disseminated far and wide, to businesses and to ‘communities’ (which communities? Do the Jedi community get all this?).

Well, well, we can guess, (cant we?), what sort of person decided what they needed to know, and we can guess with some certainty that they won’t be taking too much care of the information once they have got it.

I rather think we should call a halt to this.