We are now starting to get the long-awaited data from the 2021 census here in the UK. In the past I (and many others) have accused the Office of National Statistics (ONS) of being a little opaque with stats they don’t want to be well known. They make big statements about what they want you to know, but the nitty gritty is buried deep in densely packed columns of teeny weenie type.
Don’t worry, I’ll get to St. Joseph soon
Certainly, trying to get the data you wanted from the 2011 census took ages. A lot of us thought this would be the case with the 2021 census, but we were wrong. The ONS has recently released the ethnic and religious data from 2021 and, God bless their cotton socks, they’ve actually given us interactive maps of England and Wales! You can scroll around the country and see, at a glance, what percentage of people in Newcastle upon Tyne are Jewish (0.2%), or the percentage of Arabs in Cardiff (1.8%). All very fascinating, and I’m finding, very useful.
Here’s a link for anyone who wants to take a demographic stroll across England.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity
The maps are very thorough, going from Local Authority Districts (LAD), to what the ONS like to call Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOA) which will typically have 7,000+ people in them, right down to weeny little Output Areas (OA), these are made up of between 110 and 140 households. Before, you had to go through these in dense tables of data, scrolling across to get figures and then relate that to a map, and trying to work out just which OAs made up the actual neighbourhood or town you were looking at. It could be frustrating and took ages. The maps allow you see very swiftly and easily the make-up of an area, which can be very useful if you want to swiftly check if there is an “angle” to s news story that’s not being mentioned in the press.
Tonight, I saw a local news story that immediately made me think of going to the maps and the result was very interesting indeed. Here is the headline.
The nativity scene was outside All Saints Church in the town of Ipswich, in the country of Suffolk, in the part of eastern England known as East Anglia. In the article hands are wrung, heads shaken, all very distressing and depressing. The priest is, according to the report, baffled.
Suffolk is a pretty rural place, Ipswich is the biggest town, at around 133,000 folk, and the whole county has a population of less than 800,000. As of the 2021 census Suffolk is 87% “white British”, around 12% above the average for the UK. So, it would not be unreasonable to assume that the vandalism was indeed the mindless work of standard issue English lads, motivated by nothing more than excess testosterone and boredom with life in a provincial town. Indeed, that may well be the case, but I thought I’d check out a hunch.
Although Suffolk is a pretty white bread place as a whole, I happen to know that Ipswich is rather more diverse, having folk from various places that have moved there from abroad in recent years. I also know that when this happens folk tend, not unnaturally, to cluster with others from the same point of origin. This means that the broad-brush stats at a higher level do not reflect the actual neighbourhoods people live in.
So, here is a large section of the interactive map for England and Wales, showing the percentage of Muslims. I’ve highlighted Ipswich and given its percentage of 3.9%, rather below the UK average Muslim population of nearly 7%.
Let’s go down to a lower level showing the MSOA level, here I’ve indicated where All Saints Church is, as you can see it’s in one of two areas of Ipswich with a higher (around 6%) Muslim population.
Finally, down among the OAs, we can see that the church is in fact, right on the “border” between a neighbourhood of around 2 % and one of an average of about 13% Muslim population. Add to this the fact that the age profile of the Muslim population is usually much lower, and it is likely that the proportion of teenage and early twenties Muslim lads in that area is more like 20-25%. More than enough for the highly territorial creatures that young men are to see those streets as Muslim turf.
Of course, none of this is evidence that the perpetrators of the vandalism were Muslim youths motived by territorial tribalism and religious bigotry, but I do find it highly suggestive that the church is right on what could be seen as a demographic fault line, and that the nativity display was across the road from and facing a concentration of Muslim households. Certainly a good few people in the online comments sections have jumped to the Islamic conclusion, and people in the area won’t need to go to the ONS maps to know the nature of the area.
It’s not a huge story in the great scheme of things, and I doubt we’ll ever hear who was responsible, especially if their names are Mustapha, and Ibrahim, rather than Darren and Wayne. But it does show the usefulness of the new maps. I wonder if people who are actually paid to investigate stories like this will start to use them? There are other demographic shifts in the 2021 census that I’ll do posts on (oh BOY are there), but I thought you might find this little story interesting.