One of Margaret Thatcher’s most cited political pronouncements was, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ She went on to make this come true.* The dissolution of society gradually eroded people’s sense of community, and increasingly turned individuals into each other’s competitors.

A paper reality is being created that has less and less to do with actual reality.

Poverty and failure could not be attributed to misfortune or chance, but betrayed religious and moral shortcomings. Conversely, success and wealth testified to God’s blessing on one’s personal efforts. The blend of religion and enterprise created an ethos of thrift and sheer hard work: the recipe for the Golden Age.

The modern individual has grown up in a highly unstable environment in which almost everything is attainable and just about anything goes — the only rule being that you have to consume. The snag is that you must engineer your own success: if you fail, you must be either lazy or sick.

‘Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual solutions … A preoccupation with individual symptoms may lead to a “disembodied psychology” which separates what goes on inside people’s heads from social structure and context. The key t

Every time we walk down the street, turn on the television, or open a magazine we are told how to behave and how to attain the perfection expected of us. We all have to jump through evaluation hoops; we are forever being ‘invited’ to participate in health checks, audits, screenings, tests, and so on; and on top of that we are expected to carry out

we can never make a naïve choice for the individual and against society, or conversely, for society and against the individual. We cannot do this, because we know that their apparent opposition cloaks mutual dependency.

classification systems can never be ideologically neutral. Any ordering in categories implies a political or moral significance, or makes it explicit.

So, instead of consumers, we need once more to become citizens. If we want politics to be governed by the public interest — and that is more necessary than ever — we ourselves must promote that public interest, rather than private concerns.