Radical
Statistics
What Radstats does
The Radical Health Statistics Group produced a pamphlet on health and personal social services statistics in 1976 and gave evidence to the Royal commission on the NHS in 1977. The Health Groups later publication include An Unofficial Guide to Health Statistics, 1980. Unsafe in their hands: health service statistics for England, 1985. Facing the Figures: What is really happening to the National Health Service, 1987. A new version of the 1980 pamphlet under the title Official Health Statistics: An Unofficial Guide will be published later in 2000 (see MacFarlane, 1999).
Many Radstats members contributed to the book Demystifying Social Statistics (Irvine, John, Ian Miles and Jeff Evans (eds) 1979). The Demystifying Social Statistics book has proved to be a landmark study in explaining the ways in which statistics and statistical method are socially constructed. The 1998 book Statistics and Society edited by Danny Dorling and Ludi Simpson follows similarly broad themes.
The Radical Statistics Race Group with the Runnymede Trust published Britain's Black Population in 1980. There was a second edition in 1988.
Criticisms of the government's use of statistics in publications by members of Radstats in the 1980s inspired the 1989 Channel 4 TV Programme Cooking the Books.
The Cooking the Books Programme was a key event leading to debates in the Royal Statistical Society on the integrity of official statistics. These debates can be linked to the inclusion of a pledge to establish an independent statistical service in the Labour Party's 1997 election manifesto, and the establishment of a Statistics Commission in 2000.
