Cameron’s battleground against Brown: civil society versus the state

One of the most successful smear campaigns in the modern era concerns Margaret Thatcher. It was alleged that she stood for a narrow, selfish individualism without reference to wider duties and responsibilities. This claim was based in part on a single remark made by the then prime minister to the magazine Woman’s Own in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as Society.’

Her words were ripped out of context and then distorted. Read in their full form, it was clear that Mrs Thatcher was making a profoundly moral point, fully coherent with both the Christian tradition in which she had been reared and the most generous ideals of the Conservative party which she represented. She was saying that our most pressing problems can never be solved by an abstraction such as the state. On the contrary, we are all moral and responsible individuals. Put in concrete terms: if our neighbour is in distress, we go and help personally rather than just wait for social services to arrive.

In short, Mrs Thatcher’s comment contained a profound insight into the nature of the human condition. We are not instruments of other people’s will or creatures of bureaucratic convenience. We should never simply blame others, and must always take a personal and burning accountability for the world we live in.

Yet the smear against Mrs Thatcher stuck. This was partly because there was some truth in the caricature. When she came to power in 1979, the British economy and society was so weighed down with state and trade union power that we were close to collapse. In these desperate circumstances Margaret Thatcher and her Tory party were too prone to try to redress the balance by emphasising the legitimacy of individual aspiration at the expense of wider public duties.