This book examines the relationship between two countervailing political forces in Britain. These are, on the one hand, the government’s desire to collect, collate, and deploy data about the people and, on the other hand, the people’s desire to keep their own affairs private. The interplay of these two political currents is studied from the start of preparations for domestic defence in the build-up to the Second World War, until the passage of the 1984 Data Protection Act. The first side of this political relationship, the government’s data gathering, is examined through a detailed study of population registration and systems that were recognised as being de facto registers. A population register is an up to date, centralised list of everyone in the country including some of their personal information, but particularly their current address. It needs to be regularly updated to maintain this feature and it is this that differentiates it from the snapshot impression of the population given by a census (sometimes called a static register). A population register is thus, in many ways, located at the apex of government data stockpiles and can be viewed as a bellwether of government attitudes towards the people whose lives are laid bare by this information. Population registers give each citizen a unique reference (usually a number). This can provide the basis on which ID cards are issued but, more prosaically, it can also allow governments to better control the data in the myriad files it holds on any given individual because, if files held in separate departments were to contain this individual registration number, it could be used as a master key to boost the efficiency of cross referencing between these different filing systems. However, this fillip to administration can become a real shot in the arm if the registration number becomes a common number used for indexing files across all government departments. If this happens, government data can be recast into an interconnected, if not unified, matrix allowing those at the centre to draw together the various records of an individual’s relationships with separate sections of the state to form an overall picture much more easily than would otherwise be the case.
If it is quite easy to paint a picture of what a population register is and how it can advantage the work of government, defining privacy, the other force in this political relationship, can be less straightforward, but one thing is sure, the mainstream of British political culture has long been clear that privacy means the absence of population registration. The British have a history of loathing registration, condemning regimes that used it and pitying the peoples who were thus catalogued. This is something on which many historians have commented. For example, Edward Higgs writes that: “the British public associated state identification with wartime emergencies, and with the identification of the criminal, ‘Johnnie Foreigner’ and subject races.” 1 While Jane Caplan notes that “registration and identity cards have not normally been part of the [British] apparatus of administration” and Jon Agar points out how the tensions that developed within Britain over the use of “Prussian” methods to counter Germany in the First World War were an updated version of a hostility that had traditionally focused on the bureaucratic power of the French state. 2 These continental systems were contrasted by the British, to their own predominantly localised patterns of policing and record keeping, with Agar pointing out how these local, “partial registers” were lauded for preserving “Britishness.” 3 Central to this institutional framework, which acted to reflect and reinforce these attitudes and so to preserve “Britishness,” was a constitutional doctrine that was crucial to the way the events studied in this book unfolded. This was the understanding that when people provided the state with information, they did so on the basis that only the department that had requested the data would have access to it and furthermore that it would only be used for the purpose for which it had been solicited. This doctrine prevented the total linking of government databases and thus prevented the introduction of a population registration system by stealth, without parliamentary authority.
What the British feared would be imposed on them, were centralised records or registration to be introduced, was encapsulated in one word: dossiers. This term resonated with sinister implications because a dossier did not represent a benign and objective index of a citizen’s rights to political participation, or to receive health and welfare benefits, but rather this heavily loaded term indicated a malign, secret file of subjective comments about the person cached alongside details of the subject’s opinions and behaviour. Dossiers , it was feared, would be the inevitable outcome of any enhancement of government data gathering, and dossiers would exist for one purpose only, to intimidate people into a condition of servile conformity under the state. Thus, writers at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, seeking to capture the essence of dystopian visions of the near future, would be as likely to refer to “the dossier society” as to 1984 or Brave New World. 4 As will be seen throughout this book, British advocates of population registration regularly despaired of these attitudes, describing them as being somewhere on a spectrum that ran from a childish fear of the unknown at one end, to an almost wilfully ignorant paranoia at the other. But the fact was that this was the public attitude with which proponents of population registration would have to negotiate. Given this, it is not surprising that population registers, along with the ID cards to which they are intimately connected, have only ever been features of British life during the two world wars. Indeed the fact that the wartime National Register was abolished in 1952 is often presented as a triumph for “Britishness” allowing a return to the traditional anonymity of the British citizen: a victory for privacy.
This book will question this narrative of the post-war abolition of registration , and show how, though popular attitudes were important in this process, it was the attitude of those in the state that was pivotal to abolition. But more importantly it will reveal how, in the mid-1960s, ministers and officials planned to reintroduce population registration (or a system using the common numbering of government files that they viewed as a de facto register) and how this process drew governments into a protracted war of position with popular attitudes as these coalesced into campaigns to defend privacy. In presenting the facts of what happened around government data gathering in this period it will be shown how, in the 1960s, the intellectual milieu of government came to accept that more data about the population was needed and that this attitude transcended party political boundaries to the extent that a policy, called People and Numbers (a plan to introduce population registration) that had been devised by Harold Wilson ’s Labour government in 1969, was embraced by Edward Heath’s Conservatives. Moreover, not only did governments of all political stripes plan to increase their data holdings, they commensurately resisted attempts to bolster the people’s privacy against data capturing forays into their day-to-day lives. It will be argued here that this policy of endorsing the reintroduction of population registration in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates how much had changed in this area since registration’s abolition in 1952 and that the roots of this volte-face can be found in the outlook of ministers and officials who, in the 1960s and 1970s, abandoned any defence of a traditional “Britishness.”
As such this book will highlight policy continuities that cut across party divides. Political histories that cover sections of the period examined here tend to focus on one government, or one party, with the result that they do not draw out these continuities . Additionally, because interest in the topics covered here: data, privacy and (in broad terms) surveillance is relatively new, these topics are not usually raised by more general political histories. Thus, the literature on the Labour governments of 1945–1951 does not mention the issue of registration and neither do works on Labour in the 1960s and 1970s. These works similarly have nothing to say about the reform of government statistical services, and if they comment about government and computerisation it is on government policy towards the production of computers, not governments’ use of the technology. Political histories of the Conservative government elected in 1979, or its predecessor in the early 1970s, are similarly silent on the subjects discussed here. But having said that, the copious literature on Thatcherism and the New Right does offer conceptualisations, such as Andrew Gamble’s The Free Market and the Strong State, which can be used to aid understanding of the attitudes and behaviour of some ministers in the 1979 government. 5
Biographies and autobiographies written on or by the main Conservative political players in these events also invariably omit these topics with the exception of a passing mention of computerisation in Margaret Thatcher’s published diaries. 6 However, the issues at the centre of this book are sometimes raised in the autobiographies, contemporaneous journalism and published works written by some of the key Labour actors. Where any of these latter works discuss these topics, as in Tony Benn’s diary coverage of the debates on privacy within the government in 1969, or Peter Shore ’s advocacy of open government, these need to be juxtaposed to a staunch advocacy of a “bold use of data processing” on Benn’s part, and a key position at the heart of the government’s data-gathering operations where Shore is concerned. 7 Similarly, Harold Wilson committed some of his thoughts about data gathering to paper and by interrogating his motives, along with those of some of his ministers and key officials such as Claus Moser and Michael Reed (the chief statistical officer and the registrar general respectively), this book will highlight the certainty among progressives that increasing the flow and scope of data was in itself a laudably progressive end for government. 8 This will be contrasted to other contemporaneous views of government data in general and of population registration in particular that expressed the public’s chariness about allowing increases in the government’s data stockpile.
However, recent interest in data collection has produced three books edited by Jane Caplan and John Torpey , Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter and Ilsen About , James Brown , and Gayle Lonergan that examine population registration systems. 9 Many authors in these books point out what might be called the positive side of population registration, highlighting how registration gave people access to the political and socio-economic benefits of citizenship and further, how registers could therefore become the site of political struggles rather than simply a method of state control and surveillance. However, this book is premised on the fact that such political negotiation or struggles between the registering state and the registered people can only occur in states where registration is used. This explains why the authors in these collections have not studied Britain in this period: they have written about registration systems, and Britain did not have population registration in peacetime. So what is studied here is not a series of struggles based on a functioning registration system, rather it is the struggle of the British state to introduce a system of registration, along with the earlier struggles of some political actors within the state to keep the wartime system in place in peacetime. Despite this central difference, between Britain and other states studied in these three edited volumes, it was nonetheless the case that those who wanted to introduce peacetime registration sought to use arguments of fairness and entitlement on the occasions when they attempted to make their case for regist...