ABSTRACT
The social insurance legislation of the first Attlee Government followed naturally from the work of the Churchill wartime Government, the National Insurance Act of 1946 must be regarded as a harvest towards which all three major parties had contributed. The scheme sprang partly from the demographic forecasts of the thirties, which had predicted a continuous decline of the birth-rate; and from sociological evidence of the same period that working-class mothers had often been able to feed their children only by half-starving themselves. The final eccentricity of the scheme was that the allowances were treated as taxable income, so that for income tax payers the scheme represented a great deal of administration for the disbursement of a large number of very small sums of money. The most impressive part of the social security programme was the National Health Service, set up under the Act of 1946.
