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None of her antagonists – who have reiterated the text tens of thousands of times – has ever put the words in context. The then prime minister was being critical of people who looked to the state to solve every difficulty. She said: ‘They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s 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 after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.’
Reading the full quote, it is easy to understand what was going on. Thatcher was speaking from within the Christian tradition. She was saying that each of us has a personal responsibility to look after our neighbours, and should not merely expect impersonal state institutions to do that job for us. This is how Thatcher herself explained her comment years later: ‘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.’ Her remarks have echoes of Evelyn Waugh when accused of being out of touch with the man on the street. He said that ‘the man in the street does not exist. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul.’
But now comes a fascinating suggestion that Thatcher was actually invoking the philosopher John Macmurray. This is from Ian Lang, who served in Thatcher’s Cabinet. In his autobiography, published this month, Lang discloses how he took exception to the remarks and ‘in the intimacy of her study I thought I could (uncharacteristically) risk a confrontation with her by challenging that claim, which I thought wrong as well as politically inept’.
Lang says that he expected a ‘fusillade’. There was none. ‘She said:
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