ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the government’s view of population data before the election of the Wilson government in 1964. It establishes the parameters of the norms and protocols that governed the use of government data. It also sets out the position of the forces, such as medical research and social science that sought access to this data showing how, whether they were operating inside the state or in civil society, they were largely unsuccessful until 1964. Thus, this chapter gives an overview of the political norms of Britishness, with respect to population data, which, as Foucault remarked, differentiated Britain from the rest of Europe. The first section shows how these operated by examining the abolition of the British wartime National Register. The second and third sections look at social science and medical research, respectively, illustrating how, in the post-war period, governments kept them at arm’s length and how this stymied both sides of this relationship, preventing the emergence of a fully modern biopolitical approach to politics and data, a logjam that was only broken by the arrival of the Wilson government in October 1964.
