Whether you are delighted or alarmed by the changes in England and Wales probably depends on your own experiences
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Boris Johnson: the blond self-parodic Englishman is also a 'one-man melting pot'. Photograph: Matthew Aslett/Demotix/Corbis
How did you react to the revelations which emerged from the 2011 census for England and Wales? Did you measure it against your own life, daily experiences and immediate family? Did you recognise a country which is less white, less Christian, less married than a decade ago – to the alarm of some cultural conservatives and the delight of the multicultural crowd?
I think it's fair to say the above trends have been gathering pace for most of the decades since the second world war and that what is different is the scale of the momentum in the past decade, chiefly – but far from exclusively – driven by the huge influx of arrivals from new EU member states which the Labour government allowed after 2004.
As with most things in life there's an upside and a downside to all that and which side we take is coloured by our own experience. Get a Polish plumber to fix the drain or a Polish nanny to mind the kids more cheaply and better than those the census calls "white Britons" and it must seem a useful addition to life's rich and increasingly diverse patterns – as the Guardian's Johnny Freedland suggests here.
Lose those two jobs to a foreigner and then find the local primary school or hard-pressed GP's surgery overcrowded by the same foreigner's family and it's not such fun. Whether or not the pros will outweigh the cons in the years to come it's too early to say. Just look how 17th-century Protestant migration patterns from Scotland to Ulster have echoed noisily down the centuries, while Protestant refugees from France to England at the same time have proved entirely benign.
Thanks to immigration Britain's demographic trends are healthier than in many neighbouring countries – ageing populations can be a serious problem for society – but the economic benefits seem to be mixed. There are too many other variables, not least the need to restore growth, to permit a confident prediction. Some immigrants are stinking rich, others stinking poor.
Alarm over census data has been routine since they were started in 1801. Note that Scotland goes its own way – virtually unremarked in insular Fleet Street where the Times reports that the population of "Britain" is now 56.1 million. Whoops! Today's Northern Ireland's data, always sensitive on religious/ethnic grounds of its own, is here.
In any case, a lot of other things affecting the makeup of the population are happening without a single Polish plumber or Indian-born IT specialist in sight. I think I read that there are now more people with degrees than with no qualifications. That squares with my own experience and observation – though it won't be so on many a council estate.
None of my parents' generation went to university in our family, nor did most of my dozen cousins and two – my sisters – of my three siblings (though they both trained as teachers which would count nowadays). We each had three children – six of each – so there are 12 nephews/nieces/cousins in play, all but one of whom are graduates and in work.
What is striking to me, surprising too, is that they range in age from 27 to 42 but still have only six children between them. Wow! That's a drop on our generation. What happened? Everything from later marriage/partnership to what may be a reluctance to commit. "In the old days you just had to get on with it. Young people today have a bewildering range of choices," says a wise old child psychiatrist of my acquaintance.
In the wider family we've got same-sex partnerships and two mixed-race marriages. My Canadian niece is married to a man whose mum is Parisian French and whose father is a Sikh. My two grandchildren are half Chinese with a dash of Burmese, though it should be added that my wife is a Kiwi of English, Irish and Channel Island stock, while my contribution is mostly Cornish.
Tricky, isn't it? My wife has paid taxes and held citizenship here (before she met me) for almost 50 years – but she still sounds a bit foreign. My Salford-born daughter-in-law's grandmother who died in Sarawak last week at 98 crossed the South China Sea at 18 to marry a man she barely knew. It worked out fine. They educated all their children – even the girls – and their offspring live in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and of course London.
Big cities suit migrants and it's always worth reminding cosmopolitan city dwellers that the Guardian's beautiful maps still show vast swaths of the country which are over 90% white Briton – Cornwall is 98% so – where foreign-looking faces are rare. But even cities vary. A Frenchman of Vietnamese stock I know was shocked to be racially abused in monochrome Newcastle upon Tyne the other day. Yet in Essex, where they joked a generation ago that "even the newsagents are white", Priti Patel is now Tory MP for Witham. Things change – but they also remain the same. Patel articulates Essex values.
The census confirms that fewer now call themselves Christian, but they are still 59% against the Muslim 4.8%. Though less than half of those over 16 (an odd cut-off point that?), the married (46.6%) are still the largest block, and not all single adult households hope to remain that way and probably won't. Renters outnumber mortgage holders (a serious reflection on price and shortage) but homeowners who have paid it off should not be overlooked either.
And so it goes on. As usual the Daily Mail's editorial page is alarmed by the march of diversity and the metropolitan editorial team at the Guardian is encouraged. I'm not sure either view captures the appropriately mixed message from the data.
In the Mail melancholy writer Douglas Murray argues that the scale of immigration in the noughties has been too fast to absorb, though the success of the London Olympics points to a brighter message. But is the Guardian editorial right to conclude that "it is very bad news for the Conservatives" for the same reason that the decline of "angry white men" as a demographic block is proving fatal to the US Republicans?
I'm not so sure. The British Tories have not painted themselves into such a foolish corner as the Republicans. Our culture wars are not so shrill despite this week's furore over gay marriage. The newcomers are often cultural conservatives who are comfy (I recently heard a clever bishop say) living in a monarchy. Cameron's marriage manoeuvre will please some, offend others. Even the Mail shrewdly carries an upbeat article on a successful mixed-race marriage.
So it is surely as premature to assume the newcomers will be anti-Tory as it is for the Mail's Murray to trail – again – the preposterous conspiracy theory that Labour let in the Polish and Catholic millions, those Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims, because they hoped to create a majority Labour-voting coalition.
People aren't static in their views. Their circumstances change and so do they – that's why they migrated in the first place, as my wife still occasionally reminds me. After all, the census confirms that "white Britons" are now a minority in the capital (though whites and Britons are not), a city famously Labour-leaning. Yet who has it twice elected as its mayor?
Why, a Tory, blond and beefy Boris Johnson, a self-parodic chameleon of an Englishman. Yet dig a little deeper and you are reminded that Boris epitomises the diversity of the 2011 census. He is a bit English, German, Turkish, a bit Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Where does that blond mop spring from? From Goths who settled in Anatolia in the 5th century AD, says his biographer, Andrew Gimson. New-York-born Boris calls himself "a one-man melting pot" and he is right. It is part of the rascal's appeal.
Not every immigrant is so clever, well-educated or entertaining, but us locals can be pretty dull too. So let us suppress those doubts and make the best of who we have now become: we may be that much-photographed Sikh Guardsman in a turban, but we're also Boris, though probably less flamboyant, blond or Tory. It could be worse.