News: 1616164025

You were supposed to put "Work of a confidential nature in the national interest" on say a visa application to visit the USSR, to "avoid arousing suspicion".

Given the Cambridge spies of the time, maybe "which nation's interest?" would have been a helpful auxiliary question.

Person asking for directions in Whitehall.

Which side is the foreign office on?

"Ours, I think" says the passing civil servant

Wasn't there a law making it illegal to obtain personal information about a police/army/security-services person ?

Maybe but I doubt those organisations' HR/Establishments offices are breaking the law.

refer them to the unit press officer.

I can't tell you who I work for. Please contact the MMB press officer at "1 secret underground bunker, London"

If working as a contractor I'd have thought the correct answers of the contracting company's name and the individual's job title within the company ought to be satisfactory for the MoD. BAE/Senior Engineer or Capita/Hell Desk Slave don't give too much away.

Last time I refused to answer a few questions as I thought them an unwarranted invasion of privacy. I'm pleased to see we're getting some official guidance on how to do that this time.

A census taker once tried to test me.

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

You did not show him the nice window view on the 42nd floor, where the window opens outward to accommodate nosy question-askers high flying abilities to squish the floor at basement level?

How painfully civilized of you.

No one else upset "sex" is seemingly a binary choice ... ?

No one else upset "sex" is seemingly a binary choice ... ?

Well, you're either getting it or you're not.

Sex is binary, you do it with "zero" or "more than zero" other people

Gender is the one where you can make up whatever shit you want

Have you actually completed the census? That part is quite clear, and the part about gender is also quite clear.

> It's frowned upon to boast about holding it because that marks you out as a person of interest to hostile foreign countries.

Back when I had security clearance it was classified to the level of the classification that you held that classification. In fact the existence of a classification of level X was itself classified to level X, so logically you could never be aware of the existence of a security clearance unless you held that security clearance.

Pointed this out when my next employer was looking for staff who had security clearance to work on a defence project. We decided on a "if I asked you if you held clearance level X would you be able to confirm that" ? question

but wouldn't that be breaking clearance by informing someone that said clearance existed?

It's the same logic as "if I asked you if you had been served a national security letter - would you legally be able to deny it?"

As judges have a nasty habit of seeing through clever logic, we had organisations including Apple publishing [1]Warrant Canaries , stating at regular intervals that no such subpoenas had been received.

Apple no longer state that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Do you know whether any of this entirely random collection of letters is a security clearance? And this? And this? ....

To which my answer would be no either way on principal.

And exactly which principal would you be on when you answered?

[1]A bit like this ?

[1] https://xkcd.com/246/

My answer would be:

I don't know.

Any one used to dealing with historic census returns learns to treat the answers with a degree of caution. It's not unusual to find a couple in their 50s or 60s with daughters aged about 30 and 2. I also recall one family who lived on the canals who were always, it seems, born wherever it was they were moored at the time of the census. And the 1841 census has a 5 year old Queen Caroline.

Responses on other official documentation can be equally misleading. I recently came across one man who declared himself as "Gentleman" on his marriage register but three years later was a gamekeeper.

It's just a snapshot of the time. 100% accuracy is not really what they're going for. Hence the question about who is staying in your house as a visitor as of whatever the date of the census ends. That visitor can of course fill in their own census with their own address.

It's quite a fun past time to find oddities in the census data.

For the older censuses it is important to remember that up until the early 20th Century (so all the publicly available censuses) a significant fraction of the population couldn't read or write, so the the census was filled in for them by a census taker, who may not have written down exactly what they were told.

My wife has a hobby of genealogy, and she's actually quite good at it. One of the things she has to cope with is different spellings of unusual (and some not so unusual) names, when one census taker had a different guess at how the name was spelt from the last or following census.

Trying to track people who move from one place to another when their names may not have been recorded correctly can be a real problem.

You also have people who switch their first names around at different times, give known names rather than their christened names, or deliberately want to disappear and try to give different information in different places. It's all a bit of a game, really, and one that a lot of amateur genealogists (and some so-called professionals) get wrong, and then post incorrect information onto Ancestory and FindMyPast, poisoning the record!

My wife does not count a link until she can find at least two separate pieces of evidence linking people together.

> give known names rather than their christened names.... give different information in different places

My first company was sorting this out for N. Ireland - back in the time of the euphemisms.

When people (or at least 50% of the people) used a dozen different spellings of a Gaelic name on any official form.

To be honest, the census people should keep all the information in your census secret, and the MoD shouldn't trust them to do that, so their advice is totally right. Now where does that leave us if we don't work for the MoD... Same. The census people should keep everything in your census secret, and you shouldn't trust them. As one politician said: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" with the reply "I thought the rule for the census was if you _have_ something to hide you have nothing to fear".

Of course if the government were at all competent they would be trying to destroy trust in the census.

The conservative chaps over here replaced the census with a "government statistical survey" which determined that there were no poor people living in any city or any rural areas and so social funding could be cut.

The census only covers England and Wales (us uppity Scots don't have to answer your poxy questions until 2022), so it's not really a UK census is it?

And is also unlikely to cover those whose work is based at G84 8HL.

Living abroad I'd forgotten about the census...... I have to wonder why they bother. Other governments are able to make just as much of a screw up of planning without a census so I'm not sure I can see the point.

I remember reading that the Ministry for Transport had "moved on" from predict and provide for road planning, which always seemed to me to be a bit of an excuse for having failed to either correctly predict or provide.

Wasn't it the Labour government (they're all as bad as one another) who closed schools despite knowing that in a few years there'd be higher numbers again?

There is a real discussion about whether this will be the last census in the UK. The alternative that has been mooted is to buy the data from the likes of Google and Facebook, and combine that with information that the government already holds, on the belief that all people will have to have at least some internet (or whatever follows the Internet) presence in 2031.

I guess that this will depend on whether the cost of buying the data becomes less than the cost of running the census, and whether the intrusive snooping of these internet companies will generate accurate enough information. Don't know whether they will have to deviate from GDPR in order to do it, though.

The advantage is that the census is broadly fair and honest.

Would you trust the home office to provide data about the number of undocumented immigrants, needing social services / schools / hospitals in a given area - to the same government that would have to fund it ?

We haven't had a Ministry of Transport for 50 years and the idea that "they're all as bad as one another" was palpable rubbish even when we did.

Off Topic:"the idea that "they're all as bad as one another" was palpable rubbish"

Do you seriously think that any of the useless shower that are likely to form a Westminster government in the event of an election are any better than any other!

They're all a bunch of fucking politicians, more concerned with covering their own arses and filling their own pockets than governing the country!

The "predict and provide is dead" line triggers me as well. AFAIK it's not just DoT - it's across the board in the public service delivery functions. And yes, it's a cop-out from an onus to deliver. Prediction and *perfect* provision is a red herring, and there is no excuse for abandoning " predict and do the most possible to provide".

a [1]list X company at the last census (as I am now, different company though).

I don't remember any such guidance then and it seems silly really. Putting my main day to day tasks as 'engineering' is hardly giving much away.

The 'postcode only' guidance is particularly hilarious given the size of most locations (unless I put my home in there which might be viable as I am working from home the vast majority of the time anyway - depending on which maps are used my postcode will put you either 1/4 mile west or 1/2 mile east of my actual location).

Paranoia; we've heard of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_X_site

I think work location is a bit of a joke at the moment, anyway. My work location is in Hampshire, but I think I've spent less that 20 days there in the last year, and I live in South West England.

Not sure what I should put down, actually, especially when the exact location is not supposed to be broadcast for similar reasons to the OP.

Most of the census this year is online. We are all supposed to fill it in on Sunday.

Question 1: How much of Sunday will the census website be unavailable "due to high volumes of traffic"?

Question 2: If by some miracle the true answer to question 1 is "none", could the ONS share how they managed it?

Question 3 (for advanced commenters only): Assuming the answer to question 1 is "most of it", how would you have done it instead?

In answer to your question 3.

Having become totally increasingly irritated and confused trying to navigate any government website I opted for a paper census form. I applied over a week ago and it has still not arrived so whether I will be able to fill it in on Sunday is a moot point.

One way or the other it looks as if the powers that be have managed to stop a lot of people fulfilling their legal obligation and submit their return on time.

Do things the right and proper way.

Name: Yeshua bar Miriam

Place of birth: Bethlehem

Place of Residence: Nazareth

Occupation: Building Contractor

Religion: Jewish

Employer: Nazareth City Council

Dependents: 12

Legal Status: Son of God

British Citizen: no

British Resident: no

Do I think that this census is a waste of time?: yes

That should have interesting results…

Just think how many more people would complete it if they offered 10 lucky census respondents a prize of £1000 each.

Which would save a lot of money pursuing non-responders afterwards.

Although thinking about it, there would probably be lots of fines for people claiming that 600 people live in their house.

When I got my nuclear clearance I was told I was not allowed to travel to certain countries as "they knew who had that clearance". I wonder where they found that information and whether census information is more or less secure than knowing who has restricted access clearance.

Alan

PS -for any Chinese spies, I don't have it any more