Jewish press
The Jewish Chronicle (The JC) is Britain’s longest established Jewish weekly newspaper, being founded as far back as 1841 (with its entire archive available online), and its headquarters are in London. Its current edition (4 April 2014, p. 2) highlights the findings of its latest readership research, conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. This suggests that the paper is read on a regular basis by 156,000 people, equivalent to 67% of UK Jews, a figure far in excess of its circulation. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) certificate for The JC (covering July-December 2013) shows an average print circulation of 21,370 copies, of which 99% were in the UK and Republic of Ireland. The overwhelming majority (71%) were retail and single copy sales, with 18% single copy subscription sales, 1% multiple copy sales, and 9% free distribution. Earlier audited data are only available to ABC subscribers but circulation is evidently falling since an undated readership survey on The JC’s website (which can be no later than c. 2010 from internal evidence) cites sales of 35,000 copies and a readership of 180,000, reaching 80% of Jewish households in the UK. The survey, which contains a range of other interesting facts and figures about The JC’s readership, can be found at:
http://www.thejc.com/files/pdfs/JCH%20004%20readershipsurvey%20bk.pdf
Other Jewish newspapers may also be mentioned. The London-based Jewish News was established in 1997. It is a free weekly newspaper and claims to be the only title exclusively serving the Jewish communities of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, and Essex. It is distributed via 257 distribution points in Greater London. Its latest ABC certificate, again for July-December 2013, reveals an average circulation of 31,930 copies. In 2000 it launched www.totallyjewish.com, which is described as ‘the leading web portal for British Jews’.
The weekly Jewish Telegraph was founded in 1950 and incorporated the Jewish Gazette from 1995. It is based in Manchester and regards itself as ‘Britain’s only regional Jewish newspaper’, with four separate editions for the Jewish communities of Manchester and the Midlands, Liverpool and Merseyside, Leeds and Yorkshire, and Glasgow and Scotland. No circulation data are quoted on its website, but the Liverpool edition is said to reach ‘virtually every Jewish home in that city and surrounding areas’. No subscription is mentioned, so, presumably, advertising is the main source of revenue.
The Jewish Tribune (not to be confused with the Canadian title of the same name) is a weekly newspaper for the strictly orthodox (haredi) Jewish community. Founded in 1962, it is published by Agudath Israel of Great Britain and is based in Stamford Hill, London. It has a circulation of just 2,500 copies. It is said to be the only UK newspaper to include a section in Yiddish.
Hamodia (the Hebrew word for communicator) is a subscription-based weekly English-language newspaper. It is also specifically designed for haredi communities but aimed at an international market (in America, Israel, and Europe), although its main offices are in London. It commenced in 1998 and its international readership is said to be 250,000.
Muslim press
Two English-language Muslim newspapers in the UK have recently celebrated significant anniversaries. Harrow-based Muslim News, a monthly with an annual subscription of just £12, has had its 25th birthday, having begun in February 1989, about the same time as Muslims were emerging as a distinct faith community in British public life. Its circulation was last verified by ABC in July-December 2002, when bulk distribution averaged 21,400, but copies are also distributed via other channels. Readership is currently claimed as over 150,000 with 1,500,000 hits on its website each month. In 2012, according to an advertiser pack for that year still on the newspaper’s website, there were 145,000 readers, of whom 37.6% were in London, 11.5% in Lancashire, 9.1% in the Midlands, 7.4% in West Yorkshire, 28.5% elsewhere in England, 2.5% in Scotland, 1.1% in Wales, 0.5% in Ireland or Northern Ireland, and 1.7% abroad. The gender division of readers was 55% male and 45% female, and the ethnic breakdown 65% Asian, 10% African or Afro-Caribbean, 10% Turkish, 10% Middle Eastern, and 5% other. Also in 2012, 18,000 email addresses were held by the Muslim News and available for mail shots.
The East London-based Muslim Weekly (£50 per annum and with a mean page extent of 32 A4 pages) has now completed ten years of publication, having commenced in October 2003. It claims a circulation of 50,000 copies per edition and a readership of 275,000, with each copy being read by an average of five and a half people. It is also not registered with ABC. Copies are distributed via the wholesale trade, subscriptions, and at over 200 mosques in the UK. Its readership profile is summarized on its website as: 60% male and 40% female; 68% aged 20-45; 70% married; and primarily belonging to ‘the ABC1 and C2 socio-economic groups, possessing a sizeable disposable income, and who are frequent purchasers of staples, quality and luxury items’.
Other English-language newspapers and magazines for Muslims in the UK have come and gone over the years, of which perhaps the most influential was Q News, which was published between April 1992 and October 2006, to judge from records in the national serials union catalogue. The Muslim Post weekly newspaper seems to have lasted only between 2009 and 2012.
Methodist statistics
The most recent quarterly meeting of the Methodist Council took place in Leamington Spa on 5-7 April 2014. One of the papers under consideration was MC1457, ‘Statistics for Mission Report, 2014’. Although this is not the detailed triennial statistical report for the Methodist Church for 2010-13, which will be presented to the Methodist Conference over the summer following completion of ‘verification and reasonableness checks’, it does include headline findings on the general direction of travel, as well as noting new measures and enhanced dissemination of data. The four-page report can be read at:
http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/coun-MC14-57-statistics-for-mission-april-2014.pdf
Membership and attendance figures are said to ‘show year-on-year decreases across the connexion and suggest a narrative of general decline’. The number of Methodist members in Britain at 31 October 2013 was 208,679, 10.0% down on 231,708 in 2010, while average weekly church attendances fell from 208,962 to 193,210 (or by 7.5%) over the triennium, albeit the annual rate of decrease in churchgoing was slower in 2010-13 than it had been in 2004-07 (2.6% compared with 4.5%). Potentially even more significant than a ten-year decline of 32% in weekly attendance is the 47% drop in the community roll, Methodism’s most inclusive performance indicator, of all those in pastoral contact with the Church. The latter figure is tentatively attributed to a change in the recording and reporting of the community roll, but this explanation is not unpacked.
The report to Methodist Council was glossed in an editorial in the Methodist Recorder for 4 April 2014 (p. 6). It is said to ‘make for pretty grim reading’, the decreases being ascribed to ‘a combination of the deaths of large numbers of members, alongside very low “recruitment rates” in most churches’. Of particular concern is ‘the well-documented catastrophic decline in the involvement of young people in our churches’, which is ‘inextricably linked with the widespread absence of families in our congregations’. While the scenario of ‘oblivion in around a generation’ is dismissed, the editor’s most optimistic reading of the situation is that, if current trends persist, the Methodist Church will shrink by half in the next thirty years.
Religion and social grade
In the past, social status was often thought to be a major determinant of religious allegiance, but is this still the case today? To provide an up-to-date answer to this question, BRIN has aggregated the weighted results from online political polling by Populus for January-March 2014, conducted for Lord Ashcroft (January) and the Financial Times (February-March). The combined sample of 50,685 adult Britons aged 18 and over was asked ‘which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member of?’ Percentages are shown below, first for religious affiliation within social grade (downwards) and then for the social grade of each religious group (across).
| % down |
All |
AB |
C1 |
C2 |
DE |
| Christian |
53.3 |
54.8 |
51.4 |
54.7 |
52.7 |
| Muslim |
2.1 |
2.1 |
2.2 |
2.0 |
2.1 |
| Hindu |
1.0 |
1.2 |
0.9 |
1.2 |
0.6 |
| Jew |
0.7 |
0.8 |
0.7 |
0.3 |
0.7 |
| Sikh |
0.3 |
0.3 |
0.1 |
0.6 |
0.2 |
| Buddhist |
0.5 |
0.4 |
0.7 |
0.5 |
0.5 |
| Other |
2.0 |
1.5 |
1.8 |
1.8 |
3.1 |
| None |
37.9 |
36.4 |
39.6 |
37.3 |
38.1 |
| No answer |
2.2 |
2.4 |
2.6 |
1.6 |
2.0 |
| % across |
AB |
C1 |
C2 |
DE |
| All |
26.8 |
28.2 |
21.5 |
23.5 |
| Christian |
27.6 |
27.2 |
22.0 |
23.2 |
| Muslim |
27.0 |
29.3 |
20.5 |
23.1 |
| Hindu |
33.8 |
24.9 |
26.1 |
15.6 |
| Jew |
32.8 |
31.1 |
11.0 |
25.0 |
| Sikh |
28.4 |
13.5 |
44.0 |
14.2 |
| Buddhist |
22.2 |
37.1 |
20.0 |
20.7 |
| Other |
20.2 |
25.6 |
18.7 |
35.6 |
| None |
25.8 |
29.5 |
21.1 |
23.6 |
| No answer |
29.5 |
33.1 |
15.7 |
21.5 |
It will be seen from the across table that, overall, social grade in isolation now appears to make only a modest difference to the pattern of religious affiliation. The social grade profile of the three largest religious groups – Christians, nones, and Muslims in that order – is fairly close to the national average. Among more minority religions, the most important deviations from the norm are the disproportionately large number of Hindus and Jews in the top (AB) social grade, of Jews and Buddhists in the lower middle class (C1), and of Sikhs in skilled manual occupations (C2). There are also fewer than expected Sikhs in C1, of Jews in C2, and of Hindus and Sikhs in the lowest grade (DE). The downward picture teases out some nuances, with Christianity faring best among the AB and C2 grades, and no religion peaking among the C1s.
Since we often feature polls with breaks by social grade, a classification system which originated with the National Readership Survey and is based on the occupation of the chief income earner in the household, some BRIN readers may find the following tabular summary of the system helpful:
| Grade | Status | Occupation |
| A | Upper middle class | Higher managerial, administrative, or professional |
| B | Middle class | Intermediate managerial, administrative, or professional |
| C1 | Lower middle class | Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative, or professional |
| C2 | Skilled working class | Skilled manual workers |
| D | Working class | Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers |
| E | Lowest level of subsistence | State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers |
The March 2014 Populus/Financial Times data tables can be found at the following URL, with a range of demographic breaks for the religion question on pp. 149-56:
http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/140401-Populus_FT-March-2014.pdf
Religious slaughter
The highly emotive debate about religious slaughter for Jews and Muslims, whereby animals are not pre-stunned before having their throats cut, has flared up again in Britain, spearheaded by the British Veterinary Association (BVA). John Blackwell, BVA’s President-Elect, has just called for Britain to follow Denmark’s lead in banning slaughter without pre-stunning, although Prime Minister David Cameron promised Israel, on his recent visit to the country, that he would defend Jewish shechita. Advocates of religious slaughter methods have often argued that they are as, if not more, humane as conventional techniques, which involve pre-stunning, because of a high incidence of failures in stunning.
Now, in a written response to Parliamentary Questions 192079 and 192080 on 24 March 2014, the Government has published details of incidents of mis-stunning which occurred during slaughtering in approved meat establishments between 27 March 2008 and 28 February 2014. The numbers were very small indeed, from which the BVA (in a press release issued on 5 April) has calculated the mis-stunning rate to be very much less than 1%, far below the level (anything up to 31%) sometimes claimed by defenders of religious slaughter. According to The Times for 5 April religious leaders (such as the spokesperson for Shechita UK) have reacted angrily to the Government statistics, which they consider to be inaccurate, reflecting vets failing to record properly mis-stuns in abattoirs. In its response Government also stated that the Food Standards Agency collects no data on mis-cuts in relation to religious slaughter.
