THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY!
The Thatcherite Fallacy
In an interview with Woman’s Own on the 23rd of
September 1987 Mrs Thatcher made what was to become her most famous
statement, a statement that more than any other revealed her underlying
philosophy when she proclaimed “There is no such thing as society, only
individuals and their families .” The moral bankruptcy and failure of
imagination that such an asinine statement involves have rightly stained her
reputation ever since.
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| There is no such thing as society. |
There are of course some who thought she was right; some still
do, and they sit as Conservatives in Parliament. There is however a spectre
that haunts such a shallow worldview ¸a spectre many believed had vanished, a
spectre Samuel Pepys would have recognised, the Plague. Few things highlight
how we are all interconnected more than a spreading virus. Pepys might survive,
as would the king and anyone else wealthy enough to escape London or other denser
concentrations of population. But Pepys bookseller cook, tailor might not. The
fabric of daily life, of society itself
is torn apart.
The history of responses to epidemics in this country, as in
much of the rest of the world, has hardly been a noble one, despite some
individual acts of courage and self sacrifice. Perhaps this is, in part, due to
the fact that a virus spreading among the communities in which we live
punctures just that very sense of our own/families autonomy, separation and uniqueness,
laying bare the fact that we are integrated into a community whether we like it
or not.
Thatcher was egregiously wrong, though any working GP could
have pointed this out to her.
