In what year did Harold Macmillan introduce Premium Bonds?
Harold Macmillan until he was allowed to cut bread and milk subsidies, something the Cabinet had not permitted Butler to do. One of his innovations at the Treasury was the introduction of premium bonds, announced in his budget of 17 April 1956. Although the Labour Opposition initially decried them as a 'squalid raffle', they proved an immediate hit with the public, with £1,000 won in the first prize draw in June 1957. In November 1956 Britain invaded Egypt in collusion with France and Israel in the Suez Crisis. According to Labour Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson, Macmillan was 'first in, first out': first
Harold Macmillan compelling style". However, he argues that Macmillan is remembered as having been "a rather seedy conjuror", famous for Premium Bonds, Beeching's cuts to the railways and the Profumo Scandal. He is also remembered for "stop-go" economics: first expansion despite the opposition of Thorneycroft and his team, then Selwyn Lloyd's Pay Pause, and then finally the Maudling boom, with Britain's relative economic decline, especially compared to the EEC, becoming clear despite perceptions of consumer "affluence" in the late 1950s. In the 1980s the aged Macmillan was seen as "a revered but slightly pathetic figure". Dominic Sandbrook writes that Macmillan's final weeks