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. “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 […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: "no such thing as society", austerity policies, deindustrialisation, island of strangers, keir starmer, margaret thatcher, society, thatcherism