Out for the Count (Cecilia Peartree)
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| Edinburgh Castle |
As someone whose family history research has benefitted a lot from looking at historic census records, I am fairly happy in principle to fill it in. I wonder how different people's occupations will be in a hundred years' time when researchers might be able to look at the census records of today. Ours are quite a bit different from the occupations mentioned in the 1921 English census, which I've looked at recently. My grandfather-in-law was recorded as a chauffeur in 1921, which is still a job title we can understand today, but I wonder whether it meant quite the same as it now does. I know by the time of the 1939 register he was a lorry driver, and an ambulance driver in the Blitz.
Present-day job titles can be very confusing, particularly in the new-fangled digital area. There seems to have been a fad at some point for using the word 'architect' to describe some of the people working in IT and related fields, and I had to check with the son who lives here to find out what his current job was called before filling in this part of the form.
I found some of the questions quite hard to answer accurately. I hadn't completely understood this when I completed the 2011 census form, but it's clear that having a devolved Scottish government intent on complete separation from the UK has had an effect. I had to get back to my son again to ask him if he understood Scots (the language, not the people). After a debate about it with him and then another one with myself about whether the Scots that's still spoken in real life is actually different enough from English to be called a language, although I realise the Scottish government wants it to be, I put both of us down as understanding spoken and written Scots but not speaking or writing it. Actually he is quite good at copying accents etc and surprised me recently by breaking into Cockney when we were singing 'Wouldn't it be luverly' to my grandson, so he might well be able to make an attempt at spoken Scots too.
There were also the usual basic questions about age, where you were born etc, and a question on gender which has stirred up some controversy but was optional so could be ignored if irrelevant. I had forgotten since the previous census, however, about the questions 'What do you feel is your national identity' and 'What is your ethnic group?' Both of these had lists of options which, although there has been little or no discussion of them that I've seen, might be thought more contentious than the gender question.
For instance, isn't national identity an official term that should reflect what's shown on your passport, and not something you 'feel'? Having said that, I realised while I was in the middle of answering this question that there is no doubt my son and I both 'feel' Scottish so I ticked that box for each of us, rightly or wrongly. This is quite sad really, as I remember answering this question in 2011 and ticking both 'Scottish' and 'British' and writing in 'European' in the optional text box underneath, whereas now I can't claim to be European any more and don't want to be British at the moment, although I'm hoping that won't last. I've found that the 2021 census for the rest of the UK asks people to 'describe' their national identity, which is a little different from 'feeling' it. I was born in Sussex and my son in Edinburgh, so in theory he might be thought more Scottish than I am, but now read on...
Then there is the 'ethnic group' question. Maybe I'm extra picky about this kind of thing, but having discovered that my ancestral DNA is 91% Scottish, which also matches my documented family tree, I was fairly confident about ticking the 'Scottish' box. How many people are this confident about their ethnicity? My son had an English father, but I actually ticked 'Scottish' for him too because I decided I was over-thinking it and he must at least have quite a bit of Scottish in him. The options under the 'White' sub-heading are Scottish, Other British, Irish, Polish, Gypsy/Traveller, Roma and Showman/Showwoman. I find it odd that with all this detail there is no mention of the possibility of someone being English or partly English in this section. The use of 'Other British' seems as if they have gone out of their way not to mention English. I noticed when I looked at the 2021 questions for the rest of the UK that the different national groupings that make up Britain were all bundled into one ethnic group option, which seems to me to make a bit more sense. The choices were altogether simpler. I feel that nationalism has complicated the census unnecessarily, although equalities legislation may also have played a part as the options probably represent groups that the government would like to collect data on to try and reduce discrimination.
Some further web searches led me to a consultation carried out by the National Records of Scotland about the choice of options for ethnic groups. It turns out that the Showman/Showwoman option was only added in recently, based on terms that people had written in the text box underneath the tick-boxes in a previous census.
Reflecting on it now, I'm no longer sure whether I'm the one who's over-thinking or whether it was the people who created the census form who did so. Also, I can imagine circumstances in which people might question the motives of a government that collected this kind of information about individuals in such detail. This was also raised as an issue by some of the people consulted in the above-mentioned process. I am fairly confident that the motivation of the present Scottish government is 'only' to collect statistics to back up their case in a future independence campaign, something they have never tried to conceal - but what of future governments?
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| South Queensferry - two of the Forth Bridges |
Comments
Very different questions on your form, we certainly didn't have a question about occupation, I was mightily relieved but a friend was upset at the omission. It's interesting how we all see our data and what's important to us.
As you say, what will the government and future governments use it for???
Yes, I was thinking about those snapshots of life while I wrote the post. With family research too it's hard to fill in the gaps between census records.
Given you don't get the option to put 'Scottish' on your passport, then yes, I think that was a very valid question! The Scots language one stumped me, too. Do I understand it, is it what I hear or is that just bad English? So hard to tell!