This political history studies the phenomenal growth of the modern British state's interest in collecting, collating and deploying population data. It dates this biopolitical data turn in British politics to the arrival of the Labour government in 1964. It analyses government's increased desire to know the population, the impact this has had on British political culture and the institutions and systems introduced or modified to achieve this. It probes the political struggles around these initiatives to show that despite setbacks along the way and regardless of party, all British governments since the mid-1960s have accepted that data is the key to modern politics and have pursued it relentlessly.

Examines the British socialist movement in the last two decades of the 19th century through its policies on children's education. The author reassesses the nature of these policies and comments on the validity of those historiographical models used in analyses of the socialism of this period.

This book examines the British socialist movement in the last two decades of the 19th century through its policies on children's education. The author reassesses the nature of these policies and comments on the validity of those historiographical models used in analyses of the socialism of this period.

This book examines the fraught political relationship between British governments, which wanted information about peoples' lives, and the people who desired privacy. To do this it looks at something that Britain only experienced in wartime, a centralized and up-to-date list of everyone in the country: a population register. The abolition of this wartime system is contrasted with later attempts to reintroduce registration, and the change in the political mind-set driving these later schemes to develop centralised webs of so-called objective data is examined. These policies were confronted by privacy campaigns, studied here, but it is shown how government responses succeeded in turning political debates about data into technical discussions about computerization; thus protecting its data, largely on paper, from oversight. This reformulation also shaped the 1984 Data Protection Act, which consequently did not protect privacy but rather increased government's ability to gain knowledge of, and hence power over, the people.