Misplaced faith

David Maddox (Politics, 15 April) reports that the Scottish Conservatives are to attempt to postpone the debate in the Scottish Parliament on the motion tabled by the Green Party that “there is still such a thing as
society”.

As the topic formed the central part of my doctoral thesis presented in 1991, and took me several years to develop, I am interested to know what conclusion MSPs will come to.

In that thesis, the Margaret Thatcher interview of October 1987 in Woman’s Own is quoted. She said: “‘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.”

I can honestly say that I disagreed fundamentally with virtually everything Margaret Thatcher stood for, but, on this point, I am afraid to say, she was right.

Society is indeed not a “thing”: it does not have the sort of “thing” status which individuals, families, governments, banks, prisons, schools and nations have. It is, rather, an area of social space in which these entities operate; much like the known universe is an area of physical space in which Higgs bosons, pebbles, planets, stars and galaxies operate.

If the Greens wish to debate the Thatcher legacy, perhaps they should keep away from tricky philosophical issues and focus on whether she fulfilled the promises she made when she took office and quoted The Prayer of St Francis.

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.”

Of these, the only one which can now be attributed to her is “where there is doubt, faith”; and her faith in the free market is not one which has stood the test of time.

(Dr) Francis Roberts

Edinburgh

As the list of faults in modern UK society attributed by numerous correspondents to the legacy of Mrs Thatcher grows ever longer, I am amazed that the three most obvious ones have not been mentioned. These are quite clearly the Edinburgh trams debacle, our pathetic efforts in the Eurovision Song Contest and Hibs’ failure to win the Cup in the past 111 years.

Ian Lewis

Edinburgh