Junk Statistics 8

NOT JUNK
In the UK, 51% of Black children have been sent home from school for wearing their hair naturally. (Dove advert. Pic shows historian Emma Dabiri.)

The UK population may have fallen by as much as 1.3m in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, academics have said.

The number of people born outside the UK resident here has fallen 800,000 on a year earlier. (Office of National Statistics, Nov 2020)

201K people immigrated to the UK from the EU in 2018. 145K people emigrated from the UK to the EU in 2018.

50-year study of tax cuts on wealthy shows they always fail to "trickle down". (salon.com)

As people commute and socialise less, they don’t chew so much gum, says Mars CEO.

Supermarket sales figures show that beer sales have risen during the pandemic while make-up sales fell by £180m. Sales of toothbrushes and deodorant also fell.

In the 70s British people didn't drink wine in anything like the quantity they do today. (Good wine was expensive, and difficult to find.)

Over 60% of the total energy consumed in a house during its lifetime is during its construction (including manufacture of components).

40% of adults in Britain keep debts and other money secrets from their loved ones. (The Week. Young people are the worst, they add.)

The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million black bears.

2% of black people in Britain live in the countryside.

Nine out of ten young people say they would like to get married in the future; 75 per cent of those under 35 years old currently in cohabiting relationships want to get married; over 70 per cent of people who expressed an opinion in a recent CSJ /YouGov poll supported introducing an extra tax allowance for married couples. (Centre for Social Justice report 2012)

The proportion of the population aged 16 and over in England and Wales who are married fell to 50.5%, down from 51% recorded in 2017. The number of adults who live with a partner but have never married has risen to 10.4%, up by 1.3 million people since 2008 to nearly 5 million. (Times 2019. There are legal differences between cohabitation and marriage.)

Nearly half of women in the UK remain childless at 30, says the Times. (Forty years ago, a woman who had her first child over 30 was referred to as an “elderly primipara”.)

Creative Diversity Network figuress show just 2.4% of production executives and 4.4% of series producer are non-White and only 1.6% of writers working in UK TV are Black.

10% of people listed in the Domesday Book are slaves.

The ten most obese European nations:
Turkey 32.1%
Malta 28.9%
United Kingdom 27.8%
Hungary 26.4%
Lithuania 26.3%
Israel 26.1%
Czech Republic 26.0%
Andorra 25.6%
Ireland 25.3%
Bulgaria 25.0%
(UK residents not vastly more obese than rest of Europe, as claimed, says @adamboultonSKY.)

Just over one-fifth of adults in Scotland (22%) do not use the Internet at all. (32% said they did not like using the Internet/computers; 27% said they did not need to use the Internet/computers and perhaps more importantly 25% said they did not how to use a computer. gov.scot, 2012)

1 in 4 Americans thinks Sun goes round Earth. (26% in a survey of 2,200 people conducted in 2012 answered that the Sun revolves around the Earth.) (National Public Radio npr.org)

There are some (few) advantages is being relatively ancient. I remember a time when church leaders tut-tutted over the decline in Christian belief and church attendance, telling us that, if it continued, there would inevitably be a huge increase in crime. The decline in belief and church attendance has continued apace, but crime...? Well, actually, that's declined too. Oooops! (WS)

Sept 2019: Minimum pricing for alcohol in in Scotland reduced sales of alcohol for private consumption.

In 2019, 2% of young adults in England claimed to be part of the Church of England.


JUNK
Four in five asylum seekers “are deemed to have no credible claim to asylum in the UK”, says Migration Watch. ( Not actually true. 53% of asylum claims are eventually resolved with leave to remain in the UK. @DanKaszeta)

40% of 18th century brides were pregnant on their wedding day. (Greg Jenner)

50% of marriages end in divorce.

All children on free school meals live in crack dens or brothels. Feckless parents just don’t know how to budget. (4.2 million children are in relative child poverty, 2.4 million of whom are in absolute poverty, 3.7 million in absolute poverty after housing costs; 72% of kids living in poverty are in working households; 2.5m live in food-insecure households.)

StoryTerrace has conducted national research, revealing that 1 in 4 people in Britain believe that their story is worthy of being made into a book or film. (PR Blurb)

800,000 kids go missing a year.

In England, more land is used for golf courses than for housing.

44% of women don’t know they have a cervix.

Only 15% of people in the UK who start work at entry level rise above that level during their working life, says Iain Duncan Smith early Feb 2020.

82% of women are wearing the wrong size bra (Every year for the past 50. Why do women never get the message?)

30% to 50% of zygotes never make it to fetuses. And 10% to 20% of fetuses never make it to birth. (Source: “the Internet”)

More here, and links to the rest.