I don’t know if you filled in the Scottish census – lots of people didn’t – and I don’t know how you felt about the Government asking you impertinent questions. But let me ask you another one if I may: do you know what the Scottish census really cost you? Here are the numbers. National Records of Scotland, the Scottish government agency that ran the thing, says £135million was spent on the project up to March this year with an extra £5million expected to be spent in the next two years. That makes a bald figure of £140million. But here’s another way of looking at it, and not a pleasant one. Assuming a population of 5.5million, the census cost £25 per person. Bargain! Except that the Office for National Statistics, which ran the census in England and Wales, says its bill was about £600million, which works out at about a tenner a person. More of a bargain, you might say. And there’s more. The £140million for the 2022 Scottish census is more than double the £63.5million spent in Scotland in 2011 which, even in these days of inflation, is pretty hair-raising. And the comparison to England and Wales makes it worse again: south of the border the cost of the census rose by 25% on ten years ago. Bad. But not as bad as Scotland. Some of you may be thinking it’s unfair to compare Scotland to England and Wales in this way but what I’d say to that is it’s only applying a technique the Scottish Government itself likes to use – they’re always telling us, for example, how the A&E waiting times in Scotland are not so bad really because they’re slightly less terrible than England’s. So the UK census comparison is just the SNP being hoist by its petard (whatever a petard is; I’ve always meant to look that up actually). The comparison with England and Wales demonstrates as well how the Scottish census falls short on first principles and on practicalities. The reason the Scottish Government gave us to go it alone and delay the whole thing for a year was the pandemic (it was back in the days when we kept being told bad service was “due to the pandemic”). However, the process south of the border – more efficient, less expensive – has proved the pandemic justification to be bogus. To make matters worse, the Scottish census – possibly because of the detachment from the wider publicity for the process south of the border – then produced truly terribly response rates. The initial return was 79% and even when the deadline was extended, it rose to only 89%, which was below the SNP’s target but also way below the UK return rate of 97%. And of course, the extension in Scotland cost more money: £6million. The reason all of this matters was spelled out by the Lib Dems when they published the figures on cost this week; they said the fact the Scottish census was botched meant the delivery of government services would be affected for years to come, and they’re spot on. There will be some areas of Scotland where we over-estimate the need for public services and therefore waste money and other areas where we under-estimate the need and the services will be inadequate. For example, we may not reliably know where new schools should go. This is bad. I also worry a bit about the motivations of everyone involved here. The motivation of the Scottish Government we can intuit even if they won’t admit it: they wanted to do things differently to prove the Scottish way is better but ended up proving the opposite (and landing us with a bigger bill as well). Once again, they also appear blinkered to the logic that pooling resources with the rest of the UK is going to be cheaper and more efficient. But I also worry about the motivation of the rest of us as well. There will be some people, no doubt, who delighted in the idea of a “Scottish” census rather than a “British” one, but those terribly low returns also make me wonder whether there were others who refused to take part for the same reason: unionists who thought “this is an SNP census and I want no part of it”. That is, I fear, what the centrality of identity in Scottish politics has done to us in recent years. Everything is about the geographical rather than the logical. Everything is about nationality. Everything is about whether you are one of us (or not). But one last question: is it worth it?