The census is going ahead.
The Office for National Statistics has insisted the 2021 census for England and Wales will go ahead in March, despite the possible risk of spreading Covid.
The agency said the impact of coronavirus and Brexit meant it was more important than ever to conduct the census as planned on 21 March. It added that postponing it would cost an estimated £360m.
It hardly seems ten years since we went through this farce. A farce the Tories promised to end, but here we are with a form that will be asking for all sorts of intrusive personal information.
I just love the way they’ve shoehorned both Covid and Brexit in, despite both being entirely irrelevant. I don’t think they should postpone it at a cost of £360m. They should scrap it entirely.
A team of 30,000 field workers, who will be sent to homes to remind people to complete the forms, will be given regular lateral flow tests for the virus to mitigate the risks.
There’s no risk of them getting it from me as I’ll not be answering the door to them just like the last time they came poking about in my personal life.
As before, it’s a choice of simply ignoring it, filling in just the name and address details and leaving the rest blank or filling it up with outrageous lies.
Choices, choices, choices.
On an aside, things that we want, such as the IOMTT and the Northwest 200 are considered too risky and have been cancelled but it’s perfectly okay for the government to engage in wholesale prodnosing. Double standards once again apply here.
And another aside, yesterday IPSOS Mori sent me a multi page document to fill in regarding my new car purchase last September. That went straight in the bin along with the one from the NHS asking about my experience during a recent visit to A&E. What these people don’t seem to get is that sending someone a book of idiotic questions that take time to fill in – along with having to think about the answers – is only likely to irritate me.
I don’t do surveys. Never have and never will. If I’ve bought something from you or visited your establishment and haven’t been back to complain, then you know all that you need to know. If you want to spunk money with IPSOS Mori and their ilk, that’s your problem, but don’t involve me, because I ain’t playing.
What’s the legal minimum amount we can tell them? I’m happy to tell them name, address, age just to help future family researchers, but beyond that they can bugger off.
The only info I’m going to give is already on council/govt systems. Anyone knocking on my door for more will be ignored
Absolutely bloody nothing, just like last time. They have more than enough information in both government and council databases to answer the questions about who lives where for the vast majority of law abiding folk. The rest are in places like “houses of multiple occupation” and backyard sheds and they won’t be answering any government bullshit, law or no law. That covers the Roma, travellers and followers of the prophet.
The Tories said they’d learned their lessons last time around with the 2011 Census and we’re going to aggregate the information from the data sources they already had, plus a few non-government sources like Tesco Clubcard membership. That sounds like a much more balanced approach to a census (i.e. how many people are there and in what areas do they live), which is all the government and councils need to know to manage schools and services.
That would preclude them from asking the silly bloody Census questions that they love like “What type of Central Heating do you have?”. Fuck ’em. They get nowt from me as they haven’t had for decades. The forms will go in the bin and the door will go unanswered.
I love the opportunity to scribble a load of piss-taking nonsense, whilst thinking of the reaction it will elicit from the officials when they read it!
By the way, much as I will miss it, I don’t think we can blame ‘the government’ for the cancellation of the TT, as the Isle of Man has a different government, as does Northern Ireland (to an extent).
I was making a general point that sporting events and other things we might wish to do are being cancelled, yet this bullshit is going ahead.
Any chance of starting a thread with witty but useless answers? For religion I will enter ‘smoker’. For the question on central heating I will enter ‘nuclear’. Or, since the house still has a chimney, perhaps ‘wood’. Slips of the pen can be useful as well – 7 can look like 1 for example.
More to the point, you can’t vote, but you can give them your information.
We should also remember that in the last census two of the more popular religous faiths were ” Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” and ” Pastafarian”.
I believe a lot of people also spoke fluent Klingon.
The opportunities for Branch Covidion or whatever to be one of the up and coming religions are legion.
Surely, there are so many useful questions it will be non PC to ask, and so many useless questions that will be asked.
I will evade, be literally literal, be ambiguous, etc.,exactly the same as last time.
For example, being n
North British, I am definitely mixed race and my ancestors came from Africa.
I’ll not be completing/returning or answering the door to them just like the last time