The Iron Lady

Denis was more realistic. Watching with Carol from an upstairs window as Margaret acknowledged the cheering crowd below, he ‘turned to get himself a refill and said, “In a year she’ll be so unpopular you won’t believe it”.’⁴⁹ In fact, it took a bit longer than that. But it was prescient all the same.

22 No Such Thing as Society

‘Society – that’s no one’

IN June 1987 Thatcherism moved into a new phase. Having sorted out the economy, as she believed, Mrs Thatcher now wanted to take on British society and specifically the culture of dependency which had grown out of forty years of socialised welfare. But this ambition quickly brought the contradictions of her philosophy into sharp focus. With the exception of curbing the unions, which had required legislation, and privatisation (which only involved undoing what had been done in the past), most of what she had achieved so far had been achieved by not doing things – not intervening as previous governments had done to settle strikes or to save jobs. So far she, Howe and Lawson, with their advisers, had been following a clear programme which had worked more or less as intended. The hands-off, free-market approach had undoubtedly had a stimulating effect on those parts of the economy that survived its rigours. Now she proposed to tackle something much more difficult and amorphous, where there were not the same clear doctrinal guidelines. According to the pure milk of free-market economics, the state should not be in the business of providing education, housing or medical care at all. But in practice abolishing public provision was not an option: too many voters were indeed dependent on it. She could trim a little at the margins; but fundamentally she could only try to improve the delivery and quality of services. And she could only do this by intervening directly to reform the way they were run. Partly from this inexorable logic, therefore, partly from her own restlessly interfering temperament, she was driven into an activist, centralising frenzy at odds with the professed philosophy of rolling back the state. This was to cause all sorts of trouble in the next three years.

Usually Mrs Thatcher denied any conflict, insisting that all her reforms were simply aimed at giving power back to schools, parents, tenants and patients. But an article she wrote for the Sunday Express a week after the election reveals a rare awareness of this contradiction. (No doubt it was largely written for her; but nothing was ever published in Mrs Thatcher’s name without her correcting every word.) Conscious of the criticism that her government since 1979 had served only the interests of the better-off, she set four goals for ‘a Government which seeks to serve all the people all the time’. The first three were quite conventional: to ensure liberty and security, to preserve the value of the currency and (more vaguely) to ensure ‘fairness’ for all. But the fourth recognised the tension between the philosophy of minimum government and her instinct to tell people what to do:

Fourth, in full recognition of human frailty, and together with all the other great institutions, it must seek to set standards by which people lead their lives. A society which knows what is expected of it has a sure base for progress.

Immediately she entered all sorts of disclaimers:

We do not seek to lead people’s lives for them, nor to boss them around, nor to regulate them into apathy… A government for all the people must have the humility to recognise its limitations and the strength to resist the temptation to meddle in the citizens’ lives.¹

Nevertheless the ambition had been declared in the first sentence: the Government ‘must seek to set standards by which people live their lives’. That is unmistakably the voice of nanny.

It was during an interview for the magazine Woman’s Own that autumn that Mrs Thatcher delivered the statement which seemed to define her philosophy more perfectly than anything else she ever said. Arguing that people should not look to ‘society’ to solve their problems, she asserted:

There is no such thing as society. 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. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.²

As is usually the case with famous sayings, she had made the same point several times before, for instance in a 1985 television interview. She said it again in 1988: ‘Don’t blame society – that’s no one’, going on to explain that the streets would not be dirty if only people did not drop litter.³ So her words were not a misquotation or taken out of context. But this time they created enormous outrage.

In her memoirs Lady Thatcher protested that she had been deliberately misunderstood. All she had meant was that society was not an abstraction, ‘but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations… Society for me is not an excuse, but an obligation.’⁴ In a purely literal sense it is obviously true that society is made up of individuals, grouped into families and other associations. But because it is composed of small platoons does not mean that society, as an aggregate of those components, does not exist. On the contrary, society has a collective existence on at least two levels. First there is the emotional sense of a national community, a concept traditionally important to Conservatives of all stripes, whether One Nation paternalists or gung-ho imperialists. Mrs Thatcher more than most professed a semi-mystical view of Britain as a family united by common values, an ideal to which she frequently appealed when it suited her. But more concrete than that, modern society has also a statutory existence as a network of legal and financial arrangements built up to discharge collective responsibilities beyond the capacity of the immediate neighbourhood. It was a perfectly legitimate Conservative position to argue that society in this sense had taken on too many responsibilities, which should be reduced. It was not meaningful for the head of a government charged with administering those responsibilities to maintain that it did not exist.

Her statement that there was ‘no such thing as society’ gave offence mainly because it seemed to legitimise selfishness and reduced public provision for the poor to the bounty of the rich. It denied that sense of social solidarity which Conservatives as much as socialists had in their different ways always tried to inculcate, replacing it with an atomised society bound together only by contractual obligations. But it also had implications for other public amenities beyond the social services: transport, art and leisure facilities, sewers and prisons. The doctrine that citizens should be allowed to keep as much as possible of their own money to spend on personal consumption, while essential public facilities like roads and railways, museums and libraries, swimming pools and playing fields were financed wherever possible by private enterprise – or private benefaction – rather than by the state, as in most other European countries, derived from the same belief that Adam Smith’s multiplicity of individual decisions would somehow work their magic and the market would provide. But by the end of the decade – still more by the end of the century – it was becoming apparent that this was not the case. There was necessary collective investment in public facilities which only the state could provide. There was such a thing as society after all.

The consequence of the Prime Minister’s denial of society at the very moment when she was promising, at the party conference, to devote her third term to ‘social affairs’ was that she found herself embarked on a hotchpotch of incoherent reforms, in some respects more ambitious than originally intended and generally ill- thought out. It was not only that reform of the National Health Service forced itself on to the agenda, in addition to the plans already announced in the manifesto for education, housing and the poll tax. The Government soon became embroiled in a swathe of other legislation involving broadcasting, football supporters, firearms, the legal profession, official secrets, pubs, homosexuality, child support and war criminals. Mrs Thatcher’s promise to ‘resist