Ethnic statistics and racial politics in Britain from Enoch Powell to Big Data

This paper explores how state statistics in Britain transformed migrants into ethnic categories during the 1960s and 1970s, and who these were powerfully shaped by a series of interventions by Enoch Powell that racialized the children of immigrants from the 'New Commonwealth'.

The standardization of ethnic classification through the 1991 census, and its contestation by different migrant groups reveals both the uneven and fragmented development of government statistical projects.

More recently the turn to Big Data has recast ethnic identities in Britain through new geodemographic classifications and onomastic taxonomies.

Demographic change and shifting policy agendas has increasingly forced the reconsideration of the race-based conceptions of ethnicity that emerged in the 1970s.

It is therefore, particular timely to explore the changing motives and methods for recording ethnicity, and the impact these have on British society and politics.

Dr Laurence Brown is Director of the Australian National Internship Program (ANIP) at the Australian National University, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at the University of Manchester.