Alive and Well? The ‘Surveillance Society’ and the Coalition

Abstract

The new Coalition government in the UK seems to be determined to reverse the ‘surveillance society’ which many observers claimed to have emerged under the previous Labour government. This short article reviews the reasons why the ‘surveillance society’ became a major issue in the last years of the New Labour government, and, in the light of recent policy statements, questions whether the libertarian thrust of the Coalition’s political programme can, in practice, be carried through consistently into departments’ policies.