I recently had to write an essay for university about changes in Scotland’s population since 1945. While I was writing that I happened, almost by chance, upon The Registrar General’s Annual Review of Demographic Trends 2004.

What’s so special about 2004? It was the 150^th anniversary of civil registration (which began in 1855, in case your arithmetic isn’t too hot). So the Registrar General took the opportunity to delve into the statistics and produce lots of interesting analysis on this historical trends of Scotland’s population as far back as records go.

While I should have been writing my essay, I found myself perusing the graphs. I’m that sort of person. Obsessed with graphs. I’ll share a few of the most interesting ones with you.

Sorry about the illegibility of some of these. I have to confess that I am stealing the Registrar General’s bandwidth (although this does not vex me because the public is paying for that bandwidth, and something tells me they won’t get me with the goatse treatment). The original images are huge (much bigger than they appear on the PDF), so I have had to crudely reduce them in size to fit in these pages.

Immigration

Immigrants flooding this country! Er, or not.

Literacy

The Registrar General used the number of people signing by mark while marrying as a crude measure of literacy up until 1915.

Marriages in Gretna

They are a much more modern phenomenon than you might imagine.

Divorce

I bet if you got divorced in the nineteenth century it was national news.

Death

My favourite topic! You can see the general long-term decline in the number of deaths. But more interestingly, the peaks a troughs become much less extreme, signifying improved medicinal technology and ability to cope with epidemics.

These are just a few of my favourites, but I could have included twice as many (to be honest, you’re lucky I didn’t). But if you’re interested in Scotland’s modern history and demography I’d definitely take a look at the full document.

It is probably not a surprise to most people that MigrationWatch are a raving mob of fascist shits. Unlike some, I don’t waggle words like ‘fascist’ around lightly. But here is why I apply it to MigrationWatch and their chair Andrew Green.

People who are opposed to immigration like to say that “they take our jobs”. (Let us, for the time being, leave aside the fact that they also “give us more jobs”.) But so does everyone who enters the labour force. 16-year-olds for instance. Yet you do not (usually) hear anybody advocating quotas on the number of children born.

The only people who generally do advocate that people give birth less are environmentalists wary of a Malthusian catastrophe (a phenomenon that various people have believed has been imminent since the late 18^th century but has never happened). These environmentalists are people who are often lambasted by the very people who oppose immigration for similar reasons.

But today MigrationWatch appear to have advocated just that. Or at least, they have advocated it for those mucky foreigners. That is the only reading I get out of this quote (emphasis mine):

More than a quarter of babies born in Britain have at least one foreign-born parent, it emerged this week, up from just over a fifth in 2000. It is a striking statistic that in some quarters, predictably, provoked alarm. “Many people simply don’t understand how this could have happened without anyone being consulted,” Sir Andrew Green, chair of the rightwing anti-immigration group Migration Watch, wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Without anyone being consulted? Is he suggesting that it is somehow the government’s job to impose a limit on births? Since when did there have to be a consultation before people are born?

This is sick stuff. As if it wasn’t abhorrent enough that they should seek to tell private individuals where they can and cannot live, they now appear to want to tell people when they can and cannot give birth.

It is like a policy from a hopelessly totalitarian government like China’s. The one child policy of China is widely condemned. But seemingly for MigrationWatch it would be A-okay to introduce something similar in Britain.