Although Britain has never had a set of policies explicitly labelled ‘family policies’, most if not all social policies are implicitly family policies because they are based on certain assumptions about the nature of relationships between the sexes and the generations. By careful examination of the detail of the legislation and administrative rules, together with the way in which services are allocated and used, it is possible to expose these assumptions and show that they are not only consistent between policies but very persistent over time. This paper first examines the assumptions concerning the division of unpaid labour within the family whereby women care for the young, the sick and the old and for able-bodied adult men (their husbands). The examples are selected from a variety of income maintenance systems and services for children, the old and the disabled. Particular attention is focused on the extent to which it is recognized that women are at the same time workers in the labour market and unpaid domestic workers in the home. The second part of the paper analyses the impact on their participation and opportunities in the labour market of the ideology which accords to women the primary responsibilities for caring for other members of their family. The perpetuation of such an ideology favours the interests of men and frequently the interests of the economically powerful, but it is not assumed that these interests always coincide.

This paper analyses the determinants of social policy through a study of a crucial stage in the evolution of British narcotics legislation. Conditions in the First World War fundamentally altered the way in which narcotics were controlled in England and established a ‘hard-line’ reaction to drug use later reflected in the first Dangerous Drugs Act (1920) and the debates of the 1920s. Wartime needs formulated a pattern of governmental responsibility which, with control vested in the Home Office, still persists. The paper analyses the tendencies inherent in nineteenth-century poisons legislation, and argues that, despite Britain's reluctant adherence to the American-inspired system of international narcotic control, domestic narcotics legislation as considered prior to the outbreak of war was more liberal than the wartime regulation. Drug smuggling from England to the far east and fears, largely illusory, of a cocaine ‘epidemic’ in the army in 1916 brought more stringent regulation. Narcotic controls in Britain appeared set on a path similar to that of America's Harrison Act, which was being interpreted in an absolutist way. Only the report of the Rolleston Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction in 1926 marked a victory for the medical approach, but the influence of the events of 1916 lived on in other ways.

The principle of positive discrimination in favour of the poor has emerged out of a tangled history of social welfare debate about universalism and selectivity. Positive discrimination, based on the idea of ‘inclusive’ selectivity, represents something of a hybrid of the two concepts. The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ and the recognition that universal benefits were not adequate or reaching intended beneficiaries contributed to the general case for specially channelled services. But the government's response has tended to be piecemeal, responding to specific pressures and criticisms with a wide array of small and separate programmes of positive discrimination. This article traces the particular pressures, in race relations, which contributed to the emergence of the Urban Aid Programme and shows what lessons were learned from the experience of the American poverty programmes.