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.