Parliament and the Prying Proclivities of the Registrar-General
In the month that the population of Britain will be counted for the eighteenth time, Sydney D Bailey argues that census taking, 'molesting and perplexing every single member of the kingdom... for the sake of political arithmetic' has always been a sensitive subject, reflecting the social concerns of the age.
The recent discussions about including questions on ethnic origins in this month's census are not the first on this kind of issue: throughout the nineteenth century some MPs were worried about census questions on religious affiliation. Indeed, before 1800, there were some who opposed the very idea of a national census. When Thomas Potter, Member of Parliament for St. Germans, submitted the first proposal for a census in 1753, William Thornton, MP for York, denounced the whole 'business. 'I was never more astonished and alarmed since I had the honour to sit in this House', he said, 'than I have been this day: for I did not believe that there had been any set of men... so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make the proposal we have just heard.'
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