‘Was Margaret Thatcher right when she said there is no ‘society’? I think so’

Margaret Thatcher never lived to see her vision become reality. In a candid, tell-all interview given to a British magazine in September 1987, the Iron Lady opined that “there is no such thing as society”, before going on to add that there are only individuals, families and nations.

The import of this pronouncement was not widely reported in Australia at the time because we, too, were in the midst of our own travails and what went on in the United Kingdom, however breathtaking, seemed to have very little bearing on our lives and governance. Now that’s a real pity because if we had thought about the ideas underpinning her strident policies we might have been more cautious in emulating them.

Yet within a month, the entire Western world was shaken to the core by a recession that would not only last five years but remake countries like our own in ways which would make them barely recognisable to those who entered the 1980s with a confidence that had seemed a natural birthright since the end of World War II.

To recap briefly; by 1992, the great icons of the Australian post-war miracle, the steelworks at Newcastle, Port Kembla and Whyalla, were on life support; regional Australia, the backbone of the country, was reduced to a string of Wild West ghost towns marooned in a sea of decimated family farms; and national institutions, like the Commonwealth Bank, Telecom and Qantas, all household names, had abandoned any pretence of putting a humane ceiling in the market.

But, worse than that, the worlds of millions of ordinary Australians were turned upside down. They’d grown up believing that if you worked hard at your job and saved a few bob here and there, you could aspire to the few modest ambitions that distinguished a civilised society from a jungle — a home of their own, a car to take them on an annual vacation, food on the table and clothes in the wardrobe, and, above all, the hope of a future for their kids.

In its place? Debt, more debt, pious platitudes, sanctimonious exhortations and the gig economy, which turned hard-working Australians into scavengers subsisting on a few hours here and a few dollars there. Whether Mrs Thatcher intended it or not, her vision of unleashing cutting-edge entrepreneurship without regard to the consequences for all those on the outer, was well underway when the dust settled on the 1987-1992 recession.

Nothing has happened since to bring the idea of a ‘society’ where we are all in this together — apart from political-speak from some shifty politician with his back against the wall — any nearer to reality than it was when Mrs Thatcher ridiculed the idea 30 years ago.

I’m not the only one who sees the past 30 years as a catastrophe; many have said similar things. But what interests me is why we allowed it to happen, and happen so easily that, looking back, we can still scratch our heads in bewilderment.

There is a respectable school of thought that argues that as problems become so intense and solutions so much less obvious, most ordinary people, in their anxiety, prefer to continue on, ears and eyes tightly shut, as though nothing is happening. Cassandra, the daughter of the King of Troy, who warned about trusting the wooden horse in their midst, would be as unpopular today with such people as she was 3,000 years ago.

However plausible that may be, the inescapable fact is that Academia and the Fourth Estate — the academics and journalists whose job it is to interpret the world for their audiences — failed the people of most Western countries, including our own, by not articulating any doubt or concern about the consequences of jettisoning hard-won economic security for the mirage of ‘money for nothing’. For a country where such hard-nosed maxims as “there is no such thing as a free lunch” were always worth a knowing wink, how we swallowed such guff almost beggars belief. But it happened.

Where were the academics and the journalists when we needed them most? Because it has been said that one of great crimes of an irresponsible society is that of shooting the messenger when it is the message itself that should receive both barrels.

I can assure you that they hadn’t gone missing in action, as many might assume. They were in turmoil themselves. People forget now that one of the unpleasant consequences of the savage funding cuts made between 1987 and 1989 was that our universities faded away as prestigious centres of inquiry and learning to evolve into demeaning business houses selling vocational products.

As for us poor journos, we were also in turmoil. One of the direct outcomes of the Black Monday Wall Street crash of October 1987 that heralded the recession, was newspaper and television station closures across the globe. In the building where I was based at the time, the number of staff working there fell by about 2,000 overnight, with an inevitable loss of capacity to monitor and report intelligently on what was going on in the world outside.

Throw in the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, and a thoughtful news-gathering industry was diminished to that most reviled of journalistic types, the fire-engine chaser. As I have tried to explain many times, no editor is interested in your thoughtful analysis if, in the time you spent gazing at your navel, you missed half a dozen stories, no matter how trivial, that all your competitors reported. So, whether it chokes us to admit it or not, we became fire-engine chasers, all.

Yet hardly anyone these days notices that the quality of their daily paper or their nightly news bulletin has nose-dived. Because if we journos don’t have the time to write perceptively, our potential readership certainly does not have the inclination to read intuitively. That’s what anxiety about the gig economy does to people.

In a nutshell, we have all become ants, scurrying everywhere and nowhere, squabbling among ourselves for crumbs to this day, but until we are prepared to face up to what we have allowed ourselves to become, I fear we will be failing ourselves, our children and all the generations before us who sacrificed so much to build something better.

And the winner will be the Iron Lady, who turned a once great country, admired, feared, envied and disliked everywhere, into a crass, calculating cash register. (But to what end?)

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