ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the contours of Wilson’s Labour government’s revolutionary data programme, and to do this, it is divided into three sections. The first of these examines what the government’s rhetoric of modernisation meant in population data terms. It explains how the breaking of the logjam that restrained biopolitics in Britain put this, and all subsequent British governments, on the trail of the chimera of perfect data. In the short term, this led to the Wilson government proposing the reintroduction of a registration system similar to the one that had been abolished after the war. The government was unable to secure its data revolution in this way and the second section details how this strategic setback, obliged it to engage in a war of position against codes of confidentiality and the power of professionals within this traditional system. The third section addresses the fact that not only were stocks of government data ring-fenced from each other by codes of confidentiality but, the institutions that gathered data were also highly decentralised. Any government wanting to unite its data holdings would thus have to be a centralising government and this would involve it in yet further political struggles against the status quo.
