Thatcher must be defended at all costs

I apologise for the length of this post and trust that you will bear with me. I have written previously how Robert Saviano the Italian expert on the Mafia has described Britain as the most corrupt nation on earth. I was reflecting on this whilst watching the BBC. If Britain excels at one thing it is the corruption of history. BBC News has a programme called Hard Talk in which they interview celebrities and famous people. I watched it because they were interviewing Naomi Klein. I am a huge fan of Naomi Klein and consider her essential reading if you wish to develop an accurate and proper perspective on the modern world. During this interview Klein made reference to Thatcher's comment that there is no such thing as society and was immediately interrupted by the interviewer Zeinab Badawi, who leapt to The Blessed Margaret's defence to tell Klein that this statement has always been taken out of context and that Thatcher believed in a community of communities. If people wonder why the BBC has lost all credibility with the public, this is a demonstration of how history is quite blatantly distorted and corrupted to serve the interests of the British elite.

Two points must be made about this. The first is that her statement has not been taken out of context by people like me and the next is that she said no such thing about a community of communities. That is a lie promoted by her supporters who cringe with embarrassment at her stupidity in making such a statement and worry in case the sinister implications embodied in her statement develop ramifications for all those who have spent their lives exploiting it. As you all know, Thatcher can be genuinely described as evil. Her statement about society was given in justification for her war against a society she saw and hated, a society she was determined to destroy. The claim that she saw a community of communities is a defence of the indefensible by her supporters, and particularly from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Even if she had said that, what on earth is a community of communities but a description of a society? My Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus (2000) tells me that a community is "the people living in one locality, a group of people having cultural, religious or other characteristics in common". If that is accepted then I submit that a community of communities is society as the same dictionary describes society as "the community, the general public, the public, the world at large". These people will go to any length to avoid admitting that she was talking nonsense.

Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is no such thing as society, was made in an interview with the Woman’s Own journalist Douglas Keay on 23rd September 1987 in 10 Downing Street. What she said was;

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first…..But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate".

                                                      (Margaret Thatcher Foundation Website)

In response to public reaction to her interview, Downing Street issued a statement on behalf of Mrs Thatcher to the Sunday Times published 10th July 1988 which stated that

"All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done. She prefers to think in terms of the acts of individuals and families as the real sinews of society rather than of society as an abstract concept. Her approach to society reflects her fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice. To leave things to ‘society’ is to run away from the real decisions, practical responsibility and effective action.”

Coming from a professional politician whose entire working life was spent in the public sector and whose income and life conditions were dependent on that same public sector, such sentiments are quite astonishing, but coming from a Prime Minister they are alarming, as they have had profound consequences that have resonated throughout the United Kingdom and have formed the foundation of the economic and political crisis that the nation finds itself in today. Thatcher’s philosophical approach has been translated into public policy for over 30 years and is the ideology that produced the phone hacking scandal, the Millie Dowler affair, the financial crisis, the EU and Scottish referenda and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The Thatcher thesis is based on three fundamental denials of social reality; a denial that the human being is essentially a social being; a denial that the institutions and structures that operate throughout our society and regulate our interactive relationships are a meaningful part of that society; and a denial that the general population accept them as such. Thatcher is arguing that people are essentially atomised individuals whose only social reality is within a family structure and who do not relate to social institutions and structures which they see as something rather abstract and distanced from their real everyday experience. She is arguing that people’s social experience does not extend beyond the families and neighbourly relationships that create types of voluntary associations. This is necessary if you propose attacking and discrediting our social structures and institutions and convincing people that they are dispensable and can be substituted by other arrangements that will perform their functions better and more efficiently. If they can be portrayed as somehow sitting outside of society and unrelated to everybody’s daily life, then they are indeed dispensable. The whole of the Thatcher project was based on destroying Britain’s public sector, promoting the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and contracting out the services and functions of the major institutions that compose society such as health, education and welfare. By attacking, discrediting them, and denying their integral social centrality you can then justify their removal as a public service and utilise their necessary functions for profit. Her project involved a transfer of wealth and power upwards to a voracious and immoral elite and reducing the standard of living of working people as far as possible in order to enhance that same elite with levels of wealth that could never be justified or spent. It was however, a total denial of social reality.
 For example, the first thing to notice from Thatcher’s statement is that homelessness is an individual problem and isn’t ‘society’s’ problem as society is ‘only a concept’ and has no empirical reality. For Thatcher, there is a living tapestry of men and women and people, (I will pass on her peculiar description of the human race as men, women and ‘people.’ That is a philosophical conundrum for another time.) What Thatcher failed (or refused) to see is that this living tapestry of men and women requires each piece of thread to be bound together and woven into the tapestry to produce a definable living organism or structure. Men and women are not loose threads blowing about on the winds of fate; if they form a tapestry they require organisation, each individual thread requires to be woven into a recognisable whole. That of course requires mechanisms to achieve this. The mechanisms that weave the threads into the tapestry are the institutions and structures that men and women create as a result of their interdependent and interactive living. Humans regulate and create a collective environment out of their collective experience; they create wholes out of individual pieces. They create rules and regulations, the most common of which are laws. But laws are only one expression of a more fundamental form of social binding; values and their attendant norms. The sum total of the norms and values, the laws, the structures and institutions that the human being creates to produce social order, stability, and regulated parameters to ensure the maintenance of that order and stability is society, the society she claims does not exist as she refuses to recognise what she presumably regards as externalities but are in reality internals, to a proper understanding of the concept of society. In Thatcher’s society the NHS, the social security system, education, housing, are add-ons, externalities that are peripheral to the reality of social life, they are not woven into the tapestry. In addition, what kind of children did Thatcher talk to? I have never met a child who has reasoned that if they have problems it is the government’s job to cope with it. All the children I have ever met look to their parents to solve their problems, not the government. Now that I think about it I was a child once myself. This post is already far too long, but I could write a book about this, it is far too important and profound to be treated lightly. Britain is indeed corrupt to its very soul and I trust you will understand my concerns. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat