In an interview with Women’s Own magazine on 3 October 1987, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the assertion that there “is no such thing as society”. Deprived of context, the statement appears callous and individualistic. However, you need to read her entire interview by journalist Douglas Keay to understand and clarify the meaning.
“I think we’ve been through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ’I have a problem, it’s the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go out and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me… ‘
“… and so they’re casting their problem on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.
“It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation…”
Thatcher’s words are indicative of the misleading narrative that has shaped the UK for the past 40 years. The passage does convey a kernel of truth. We each have individual responsibility for our actions and for self-preservation. We each have moral and social obligations to ourselves, our families and others that cross life’s path.
The main responsibility is in advancing society, and our conscience steers us towards this goal with every chiding admonition or surge of attentive capacity. The smallest positive individual action takes the entire body of society an incremental step towards good and away from evil. This meaning is inferred in the text, but gets corrupted and twisted into a hand-wringing dismissal of what is the primary function of government.
The stagnation of subsistence
Government has one basic function – to provision society. There are macro-problems afflicting society that the individual or small group would never have the wherewithal to accomplish a solution. Adam Smith proposed as much in this famous passage from The Wealth of Nations.
The problem with moving from a largely subsistence existence to one of collective endeavour is that not only is subsistence a full-time job, but the results of not investing time to it is a matter of life and death for a whole family. In this situation, people know there are exponential improvements in living standards for all available through collective employment; the desire to work on the projects is there. However, the desire is not enough to change the habits conditioned into ordinary folk for generations.
The problem to be solved was how to alter this historic conditioning. Affording the village or region a defence capacity, fresh water supply, sanitation, or ease of access to food sources and neighbouring communities exemplify early projects requiring this collective organisation and provision of resources.
The modern money system was created to alter the value hierarchy and encourage people to divert some time to collective work. By imposing a tax liability on the community, with failure to pay punishable by serious life-changing legal outcomes, the people were forced to re-prioritise and focus on managing time to allow both essential care for the family and time allotted to the community works that paid in the unit of currency required for tax payment.
Government and people are interchangeable terms
“Government” is synonymous with “the people”. It does the peoples’ bidding and is a creature of society. Tax is self-imposed by the people to ensure the government has the ability to provide essential needs and raise their collective standard of living. There is a reciprocal nature to the relationship, dismissed by Thatcher as reliance and abdication of responsibility. There is no competition between public and private sector;both serve to improve living standards and advance understanding.
A functioning society, with a competent governmental structure, realises the true value of the individual. The cumulative physical and cognitive power, provided to society by each member, is the value, the wealth, of the whole. To allow any of those units of productive capacity to suffer results in society failing to reach its potential. Hunger, thirst, lack of education, shelter or healthcare are forms of suffering that any caring society would want to alleviate.
In this context, the brutality and lack of empathy in Thatcher’s words are clear. Society may be a collection of individuals, but it is society acting collectively that creates the force for good and advancement for all. The safety net cast by society to catch those falling off the edge is a mutual benefit. It protects the vulnerable from needless suffering and optimises society’s power for good.
Thatcher’s hunger games of competition over co-operative existence
It is not difficult to understand why this single line was pulled from the quotation. The lie, that “there is no such thing” as society, is a necessary enabler for what came after. The shaming of people who rely on ‘casting their problems on society’ has continued and grown in strength for four decades. The encouragement of a culture of competition with neighbours rather than a previous co-operative existence has caused a change in philosophy in the UK and elsewhere.
There is a perception that some of the strongest communities were in the industrial heartlands, the very people Thatcher vowed to crush. These former proud towns and villages, with their bonding institutions of amateur athletics and sports clubs, gala days and other cultural and educational organisations still cling to existence, though the institutions are largely mothballed, or hanging by a financial thread.
Destroying society leads back to subsistence or feudalism
Downtrodden it may be, but the spirit of society lives on. It is inherent in all of us. We can invoke that spirit and realign government to serve the people once more. We can reverse the current transfusion of value, from our multiple societies to the life support of an elite sect living outside and providing little in return.
This is a common theme across the developed world. Voters in Scotland, Wales and the industrial north of England have attempted to influence politics back to community rather than profit, to no avail. In Scotland, voters have given up on the Labour Party and political change, either staying at home or voting for constitutional change instead. In England, the Labour vote is also collapsing into what could be a form of English nationalism. The latest manifestation of which is Brexit, where the ‘othering’ of European neighbours is symptomatic of the false narrative of competition for scarce resources.
It is imperative for the future of global human society that Thatcher is proven wrong. Society is all we have. Scotland can avoid catastrophe by choosing independence, but only if the leadership recognises the dangers in adopting a UK status quo. England seems to be travelling a darker road towards gated communities policed by private security firms, if the Rees-Moggs are in any way prophetic. For those supporting continuation of the Union, abandoning Thatcher’s philosophy and the subsequent neoliberal evolution is necessary. In desiring the continuation of the status quo, one must be careful what they wish for.
More in economy.
