ABSTRACT
In its 1951 election manifesto, the Labour Party congratulated itself on the extension of social security, through the National Insurance Act of 1946, to all British citizens. Juxtaposing the post-war welfare state against the inadequate social policies of the 1930s, Labour basked in the glow of its revolutionary achievement:
[In the inter-war years] millions suffered from insecurity and want. Now we have social security for every man, woman and child….Now we have a national insurance system covering the whole population. . . . 1
Such characterizations of national insurance-as a universal, comprehensive system that would protect all British citizens against loss of incomepredominated in the optimistic political climate of the 1940s and 1950s. Some historians have echoed the Labour Party’s assessment, with Peter Baldwin going so far as to describe the expansion of state welfare after the war as “an historic event equivalent in importance and stature to the French and Russian Revolutions.”2 Rodney Lowe contends that the national insurance system that emerged after the war:
transformed the fundamental nature of the relationship between the state and its citizens. . . . For the fi rst time in history all citizens were to be insured ‘from the cradle to the grave’ against every eventuality which might lead to the inadvertent loss of their income.3
