Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer

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For war pensioners, new pensions were provided "in deserving cases at the rate of over three hundred a week. Previous chancellors have opted for whisky ( Kenneth Clarke), gin and tonic ( Geoffrey Howe), brandy and water ( Benjamin Disraeli and John Major), spritzer ( Nigel Lawson) and sherry and beaten egg ( William Gladstone).

This has strengthened a pre-existing trend towards the chancellor occupying a clear second position among government ministers, elevated above his traditional peers, the foreign secretary and home secretary. As a result of this change, 60,000 elderly people, whose meagre savings had previously reduced their pension entitlement, received the full state pension. Initially 14, and ultimately 28, Labour MPs (and just one Conservative) joined, but the country was not yet ready to abandon class politics, and a majority even on Labour’s right remained – calculating (correctly, as it turned out) that the more likely route back to office lay through fighting for social democracy from within. In the field of health care, funds were allocated to modernisation and extension schemes aimed at improving administrative efficiency. BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed are published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution.

Nadhim Zahawi made chancellor after Rishi Sunak resigns - as Steve Barclay replaces Sajid Javid as health secretary". The NHS brought major improvements in the health of working-class people, with deaths from diphtheria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis significantly reduced. The result of this was that every parent or dependent in receipt of a need pension, received an immediate increase of between 2s. The government set about implementing the Wartime plans of William Beveridge's plans for the creation of a 'cradle to grave' welfare state, and set in place an entirely new system of social security. The chancellor is the third-oldest major state office in English and British history, and in recent times has come to be the most powerful office in British politics after the prime minister.

He was also opposed to the new Keynesian economic ideas which provided a rationale for deficit spending, and criticized their expression in the Liberals' manifesto for the 1929 election, titled We can Conquer Unemployment. Snowden later wrote in his autobiography: "I was brought up in this Radical atmosphere, and it was then that I imbibed the political and social principles which I have held fundamentally ever since". Because the House of Lords is excluded from financial matters by tradition confirmed by the Parliament Acts, the office is effectively limited to members of the House of Commons; apart from the occasions when the lord chief justice of the King's Bench has acted as interim Chancellor. In 1930 he rejected the Mosley Manifesto issued by junior Labour ministers led by Oswald Mosley proposing a programme of high spending on public works and autarkic Imperial Preference to combat unemployment.War pensions and allowances (for both World Wars) were increased by an Act of 1946 which gave the wounded man with an allowance for his wife and children if he married after he had been wounded, thereby removing a grievance of more than twenty years standing. Living conditions were poor; instead of expansion, the country's task was to replace the national wealth destroyed or used up during the war. This plan, driven forward by a newly created Department of Economic Affairs, aimed to encourage more direct government involvement in planning and modernising the economy, including through applied science and technology.