Don't tell them everything...

I see that Ladbrokes are offering 4/1 that more than 400,000 people will state their religion as “Jedi” in next month’s census.

For crying out loud why?


My opposition has nothing to do with US arms firm Lockheed Martin being paid £150million to organise the census, although that is offensive on just so many levels.

My point is simply what IS the point? In pre-internet, pre-hard-sell days when we didn’t have to submit every intimate fact about ourselves to buy a toaster, there was a point to us divulging 32 pages of personal details, every decade.

But today when computer databases hold so much information it would take a six-year-old two minutes to find out the precise nature of a personal injury that happened on a wet Thursday afternoon between Maths and Geography back in 1983, why bother?

How hard would it be to put together an accurate snapshot of modern Britain by scouring our NHS and NI records and adding that to all the information we’ve divulged to company questionaires? (my dead cat still gets offers of a pen from insurance firms after I filled in a pet food survey 5 years ago).

Why is this government wasting £480million on an out-dated paper exercise when they’re telling councils to sack thousands of staff because they’re skint? Especially when only law-abiding people will fill the census in, whereas those who have something to hide (illegal immigrants, benefits cheats, serial tax-avoiders) will use it to light-up a joint or some bootleg cigarettes,whilst drinking an alcopop.

Cuts aside, the timing is a joke because we’ve never felt less trust or apathy towards the faceless people who run our lives.

How much of the information we’ve given to civil servants in recent years, such as tax returns, child benefit records and health test results, have they mis-used or left in the back of cabs or even sold to identity theft criminals to supplement their supposed meagre wages?

Bungling MI5 officials cut photos of bomb suspects in half before sending them to US intelligence.

We don’t know how many people live here illegally and we’ve no confidence putting an elderly relative in NHS hospitals because we know the accountants would prefer to see them die.

Lib-Dems rule us despite ripping up every pledge they made to voters. We were kept in the dark about MPs screwing their expenses and we were taken into an illegal war against our will.

Yet they expect our trust when asking us every private fact about ourselves, down to who we sleep with.

They tell us to trust them to build an accurate picture of our country, to spend £480m wisely, and to not have our personal details stolen by Wikileaks or passed on to private companies.I don't know about you,but I'm just a little bit sceptical

But never mind, it’s only half-a-billion quid. And my dead cat could do with another pen.