If Britain Were a Village of 100 People

Thanks to andyminion for the heads-up. :-)
You can read our article on this subject here.

A realistic sense of super-scale

The wonderful village of Britain

Yesterday's Independent carried an interesting item about how we view statistical information such as the fact that this month's estimate of global population is 6,790,062,216 - a number so staggeringly huge that it's almost meaningless.

Traditionally, statisticians convert such numbers into something more familiar to allow us to get a grip on the figure. Thus we end up with the global population being scaled down to 75,445 Wembleys or 2,341 Wales'. Any better? No, I didn't think so.

The genius of the article lay in the super-scaling: in fact, converting Britain's population of 61 million to a single community of 100 people. Britain, the village. And some of the figures have a direct bearing on the lies that the BNP perpetually attempts to pass off as fact.

Britain is overcrowded

Britain is, in fact, far from overcrowded. If Britain were a village of 100 people, and its land mass were scaled down by the same proportion as its population, the village would cover an area the size of 99 football pitches. Agricultural land would occupy 20 football pitches (run by a single farmer), while London would cover just over half a football pitch. All built-up areas and gardens would occupy the equivalent of six football pitches.

This occupied land rounds out at just 26 football pitches, leaving a phenomenal 73 going spare - presumably as woodland, moorland and land in private ownership (by people like Nick Griffin).

The two BNP MEPs were democratically elected

If Britain were a village of 100 people, there would be 74 voters but only 26 of those voters would have gone to the polls at this year's European elections. Far from the mandate from the British public that Griffin would like us to believe he got.

Britain is overrun by other cultures

Not so. Ninety-two of our villagers would be white. Two would be black, two Indian, one Pakistani, one of mixed race and two would be of other races (which presumably could be pretty much any colour from a well-tanned Robert Kilroy-Silk to a pale Lenny Henry).

Muslims/Jews/whatever are taking over the country

Again, untrue. Seventy-two people would identify themselves as Christian (although only 10 people in the village would go to church regularly). Fifteen people would say that they were not religious, while there would be two Muslims, one Hindu and 10 people who practised other religions (including the BNP's favourite lunacy Odinism, and paganism). Whatever bizarre cult the BNP's fake vicar Robert West belongs to, wouldn't even get a look in.

The BNP is growing fast

Not according to Tina Wingfield, the BNP's membership secretary, who claimed back in June that the party had achieved 10,000 members, a drop from the 12,724 that appeared on the released membership list. If my maths are correct (and they're probably not) that should see the BNP membership of our village standing at about a six-hundredth of a normal person, which sounds about right.

While these figures are outrageously simplified, they do help to put the BNP's droning about the state of the nation into perspective.

We are neither overrun nor overcrowded, though clearly more homes are definitely needed and it handily appears that we have plenty of spare land on which to build them. In fact I can think of a decent plot of land in a reasonable location that might be going spare fairly soon (if the rumours we've been hearing of late are true). It's in Wales, down in a place called Welshpool...

Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks

Up to 20 families moved to temporary accommodation after repeated attacks on their houses

Romanian families forced to flee their homes in Belfast because of racist attacks have been temporarily rehoused, but many said they wanted to leave Northern Ireland.

More than 100 Romanians had to seek shelter in a church hall last night after suffering repeated intimidation, including bottles being thrown through their windows.

The families, who are members of the Roma ethnic group, were given shelter at the O-Zone sports complex in the city today, and Stormont's social development minister, Margaret Ritchie, said they were to be offered emergency lodgings tonight. It is understood that they were later moved to student accommodation in the Queen's University area, which has been made available for a week.

Gordon Brown condemned the attacks, saying: "I hope the authorities are able to take all the action necessary to protect them." Belfast's lord mayor, Naomi Long, said the attacks had brought shame on the city.

A Romanian mother of two sheltering at the O-Zone said the families were terrified. The woman, who gave her first name, Maria, said everyone was adamant they wanted to return to Romania. She said attacks had been intensifying over the past two weeks, with youths threatening her and her children. Other people spoke of men armed with guns telling them to leave the country or face being shot.

"We are OK, we are safe here now," she said. "But we want to go home because right now we are not safe here [in Northern Ireland]. We want to go back home to Romania, everybody right now does. I want to go home because I have here two kids and I want my kids to be safe."

Belfast's small community of Romanians grew noticeably grew about eight months ago. The streets from which the Romanians fled are on the border between the city's multi-racial university district and the loyalist working class Village/Donegall Road area. On Monday night, a number of young men from the Village area threw bottles and stones at an anti-racist protest on the Lisburn Road called to show solidarity with the Romanians. The mob chanted Combat 18 slogans, although security sources in Northern Ireland said there was no evidence the neo-Nazi terror group had organised cells in the Greater Belfast area.

The two main loyalist paramilitary groups, the UVF and UDA, have condemned the attacks and said none of their members were involved.

The deputy first minister, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness, said the attacks had been carried out by "racist criminals within our society who are unrepresentative of the vast majority of the people of Belfast".

Anna Lo, an assembly member for the Alliance party in south Belfast, said the families were "very frightened" and many would prefer to return to their homeland rather than remain in Belfast.

"They are really very frightened," she said. "The women, when they were talking to me yesterday, they were really upset, tears in their eyes and said, 'You know we love it here, we'd like to live here, but we're too scared.'"

Some within the Village/Donegall Road community have tried to make a stand against the aggressors. A poster on a boarded-up window at 14 Belgravia Avenue, a three-storey house occupied until Monday by several Romanian families, read: "Village says No to racist attacks." A similar poster nearby was torn down by a woman on her way to work, who declined to comment.

Guardian