Senseless census

The scrapping of the 200-year-old national census is bad news. In one fell swoop it cuts us off from knowing who we are as a people, where we have come from and who we are becoming.

The alternative replacements which the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has suggested include trawling the electoral rolls, NHS registers, school and university lists, birth, death and marriage registers and tax lists.

Such a dog’s breakfast of 
measures will be open to all manner of confusions already rampant in our overburdened bureaucracy.

There has been an admission that an alternative decennial online version will be able to reach only two-thirds of the population, a statistical non-starter. The ONS “has yet to work out” how to reach the other third of the 
population. The guesstimated savings which the politicians deviously offer as their justification for this fundamental historic change have as much accuracy as those for the costs of the HS2 Rail.

Those who will benefit from this abandonment of our traditional population accounting are those who wish to destroy immigration statistics and thereby fundamentally break off the link with our past and our national identity.

Alastair Harper

Lathalmond

by Dunfermline