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The Lady is for spurning
Margaret Thatcher now appears isolated and spectral.
Lady Thatcher awarded the prizes last week in a writing competition set up to honour the late T. E. Utley, the writer and journalist whose thinking had a profound effect on hers. One of the guests told me how isolated and spectral she seemed, and how sad it was to feel that this astonishing woman seems already to have been consigned to the shadows of life and of public memory.
Perhaps the feeling was mistaken, but it is certainly true that, even if she is not unremembered, she is often misremembered. Her name is thrown about on chat shows and in print as shorthand for brutal indifference and free-market greed; those inclined to elaborate feel no need to make any intellectual effort. They merely remind us that she said there is no such thing as society. Why try harder when she herself provided her detractors with a knock-down argument like that?
I keep coming across this lazy and unjust misrepresentation, most recently in two particularly muddled new books - one by John Pilger, the other by Chris "Culture" Smith. Pilger refers without any explanation, as if to an accepted fact, to "the political and cultural impact of her revolution", notably her systematic assault on "society". And Chris Smith writes in Creative Britain that one of the reasons for Labour's election victory "was surely a very simple realisation by the British people, after 18 years of a contrary doctrine, that there is such a thing as society. A realisation that we are all in this life together, dependent ultimately on one another . . . with responsibilities for each other as well as to try to do the best for ourselves!"
This is all quite astonishingly simple-minded, or lazy-minded, or both. I do not believe that the New Labour high command is in the slightest simple or lazy-minded, but I am sure it is quite content to exploit those weaknesses in others, wherever useful, even in a Cabinet minister. I find it intriguing that Lady Thatcher can be accused of launching a systematic assault on society without actually believing in it in the first place. All the same, her notorious remark about society does need some explaining. Or rather, in her honour and in the face of these continuing misrepresentations, the explanation needs repeating often enough to turn this overactive canard into a very dead duck.
This is what she said, to Woman's Own, in October 1987. "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 first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour."
What's wrong with that? It is both true and very much the New Labour line. Responsibility for others is based on work and self-reliance. It really wouldn't surprise me one of these days to hear Frank Field saying "on yer bike". Then the great Lord Tebbit will smile his merciless smile, the one he reserves for folly and inconsistency above and beyond the call of human nature.
There is a problem with this "no such thing as society", and it is a pity she used those words, but they ought to be understood in the context. This phrase was an overreaction, or a clumsy reaction, to an infuriating tendency at the time to blame everything on "society". Society was always responsible, people always said; society must do something, usually to do with paying more tax; and society must change, as if society could be located and addressed. This is reification, a well known philosophical error of mistaking a name for a thing. Actually society is an abstract idea, and cannot be held directly responsible for the drop in value of the old-age pension, or for anything else. It is merely a word used to refer to unnumbered personal transactions, regardless of value, rather like the word "market". It can refer to something we might consider bad as well as to something good. Society really does not exist in the way that unthinking liberals used to use the word in the Sixties and Seventies and even still in the Eighties. I believe it was that nonsense that Margaret Thatcher was reacting against.
Margaret Thatcher is a woman who believed so strongly in social obligations that she found them too obvious to mention. They were a given for any civilised and responsible person. The things that matter most are often too deeply buried in our thinking to be easily unearthed. Only intellectuals are interested in grubbing around at the bottom of our mindset. And Margaret Thatcher, though very clever, did not appear to be intellectual. For that reason she lacked the gift of seeing things from other people's point of view and explaining them accordingly; it was a defect of her very decisive merits.
However, she was quite capable of putting things straight As she said in 1996: "I have never minimised the importance of society, only contested the assumption that society means the state rather than other people. Conservatives do not take an extreme atomistic view of society. We need no lectures . . . about the importance of custom, convention, tradition, belief and national institutions . . . Nor do we dispute that the bounds of society need ultimately to be guaranteed by the state." So, no more unfair misrepresentation. Anyone who wants to attack Lady Thatcher ought to attack her for what she really believed or really said; this would be difficult for New Labour, of course, since they largely agree with her.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 14, 1998
