Baroness Thatcher, who died on Monday, was a politician with the soul of a preacher. She believed in truth of her message and the power of her words to convince and change. Like Gordon Brown, she often drew on the language and cadences of Scripture, seeking to appropriate from it moral authority beyond that which would usually belongs to a mere elected politician. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…" she once said of colleagues in the Conservative Party, "They thought that a grocer's daughter didn't know how things ought to be done…" She was quoting the Preacher, author of the ancient book Ecclesiastes.
Among the many controversial and sometimes strange utterances for which she will be remembered is the claim that ‘there is no such thing as society’, made during an interview for Woman’s Own of all places (the full piece can be read here). The phrase became a sobriquet for the acquisitive and individualistic society that had emerged during the 1980s, so much so that David Cameron felt he had to reverse (or at least strongly qualify) the statement in his victory speech after winning the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2005: "there is such a thing as society," he said, "it’s just not the same as the state".
To be fair, her point was more subtle than many interpreters have made it. It was no assertion of Ayn Rand style devil-take-the-hindmost hyper-individualism, even if it lends itself to such a distortion. Rather, she was insisting on duties of reciprocal care which couldn't/shouldn't always be adopted by the state.
… 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 look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help 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… but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: "Look”It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better! […] There is no such thing as society… There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.
Which reminds me of another verse in Ecclesiastes: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Recent debate around welfare reforms have exposed the same unresolved question about which responsibilities belong to ‘me’, which belong to ‘us’, and the extent to which the state can adopt the responsibilities that, nearly everyone would agree, neighbours really do have for each other.
As much as there is to disagree with here (not least an idealism around charity and philanthropy) the idea that there is no system, no society, which exists apart from human action and choice, should rank as one of Thatcher’s least controversial ideas. The state doesn’t fund anything; not schools, not hospitals, not housing benefit, not job seekers allowance. We fund these things. And that implies a series of morally serious choices.
Paul Bickley | Image by HerryLawford from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
