where do you live fella ??
a walk round my local bus station of an evening is like being in a benneton advert !!

and about 50 % of the white folks are talking eastern european languages !!

Read my profile.

Bumble Bee – if the census was only used for recording name, age, sex, profession at an address on a given day as a snapshot, as it used to be, then it would cost a great deal less and be a great deal less intrusive. If it is to be the last, as seems to be the case. then it is clearly regarded as being superfluous, which is why we are justified in asking why this one is taking place at all. Let alone in 55 languages.

Pete. Stop being pedantic, you know very well where I am coming from, slowly but surly we are becoming the ethnic minority in our own Country, and English will not be the official language it will be a sort of Esperanto 🙂

Lincoln .7

I am not being pedantic, Linc, and I don’t think your fears have the remotest likelihood of being realised.:)

One encouraging sign so far seems to be the lack of bodies found; many people are unaccounted for but the number of actual bodies found in the debris seems encouraging.

Or the reverse, in that I believe that the tsunami also drags material far out to sea – witness the man rescued on the remains of his house 10 miles out to sea. So it is possible that thousands have drowned and perhaps will never be accounted for. The repercussions of this disaster will live on for a very long time.:(

A good friend of mine ran a factory in Bristol a few years ago and the instructions to the shopfloor were in, if memory serves, English, Urdu, Hindi, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Italian. When I asked him about it he said that was only way he could get anyone to work there. Applications for jobs were studiously ignored by the English. And conditions were good and pay the average or just above average for the area. Says it all really, doesn’t it?

I can only echo the sense of your comments, but I think we are in a minority!!

Haven’t we all debated the pointlessness of the census elsewhere? This thread is about the fact that it has to be printed in 55 languages!! Why? Because people who want to come and live in our country and enjoy the benefits of living here can’t be bothered to learn our language. And we pander to them!:(