Margaret Thatcher On Society: 1993

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years

(New York: HarperCollins; 1993), p. 626.

‘Society [is] made up of individuals and communities.

If individuals were discouraged and communities disorientated by the state stepping in to take decisions which should properly be made by people, families and neighbourhoods then society’s problems would grow not diminish.

‘This belief was what lay behind my remarks in an interview with a woman’s magazine which caused a storm of abuse at the time about there being ‘no such thing as society’.

But they never quoted the rest.

I went on to say: “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.”

‘My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations. I expected great things from society in this sense because I believed that as economic wealth grew, individuals and voluntary groups should assume more responsibility for their neighbours’ misfortunes. The error to which I was objecting was the confusion of society with the state as the helper of first resort. . . . Society for me was not an excuse, it was a source of obligation.’

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