This is the opening to my essay on the real reasons we are becoming an “island of strangers”, published in the Observer on 18 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.

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“Society? There is no such thing!” Margaret Thatcher famously told Woman’s Own magazine in 1987. “There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Thatcher’s critics viewed her sentiment as expressing a soulless selfishness, her supporters as an assertion of personal responsibility. Writing in 2006, the journalist Dominic Lawson, son of Thatcher’s longtime chancellor Nigel Lawson, celebrated Thatcher’s argument, suggesting that she would have recognised eBay as “the modern epitome of the classical idea of society”, a bizarrely transactional view that would seem to make the critics’ point for them.

I was reminded of Thatcher’s quote during the controversy over Keir Starmer’s immigration speech, and his fear of Britain becoming an “island of strangers”. The phrase implied that without a drastic reduction in immigration, and greater integration, society would become intolerably fragmented.

In the furious debate about whether Starmer was deliberately echoing Enoch Powell, another question was largely ignored: is Starmer right that Britain is becoming an island of strangers and that immigration is to blame? The question takes us back to Thatcher.

Her quote expressed a key theme underlying the transformation of Britain in the 1980s, as the social model that underwrote the postwar decades gave way to one defined by free markets, a globalised economy, social atomisation and, for some, an eBay model of social life. It’s a good place to start to unravel the roots of contemporary social dislocation.

Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.