LONDON, April 1 — It’s one of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s most famous quotes, which opposition parties have long used to attack the ideology of her Conservative party.

But her latest successor Boris Johnson has countered the Tory icon’s claim that “there’s no such thing as society”, in headline grabbing praise for the response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Some 750,000 members of the public responded to a rallying call for helpers to support the state-run National Health Service, the elderly and vulnerable in self-isolation.

A further 20,000 retired doctors, nurses and other former healthcare professionals are also returning to the medical frontline, as the virus takes hold.

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Airline cabin crew have been asked to assist medics, community groups have sprung up to help neighbours, and businesses have been drafted in for a collective mobilisation not seen since World War II.

“One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society,” said Johnson, who tested positive for coronavirus last week, saying he had “mild symptoms”.

The virus would be beaten by a joint effort, he said in a video message on Twitter on Sunday, adding: “We are going to do it together.”

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Dramatic shift

Thatcher’s remark came at the peak of her 11 years in power that transformed Britain after crippling industrial unrest in the 1970s proved the downfall of her Labour predecessors.

“There’s no such thing as society,” she said in a magazine interview in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The comment was interpreted by supporters as a defence of free-market individualism and as a criticism of an over-reliance on the state.

But opponents, particularly liberals and left-wingers, seized upon it as proof of Tory heartlessness, lack of compassion and selfishness at a time of high unemployment and social change.

It has been blamed for the widening gulf between rich and poor while Labour’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, said it also led to “insularity and isolationism” on the global stage.

Even Brexit — Britain’s divisive departure from the European Union — has been seen as part of a global trend away from international cooperation.

But unprecedented state support for businesses and individuals hit by the coronavirus crisis has now brought ties between people and their relationship with government back into focus.

“Never in our history has the government put its arms around people in the way we are doing now to help them get through this time,” Johnson said last week.

The shift is all the more dramatic as it comes just months after Tories branded the Labour party’s radically socialist election manifesto as “reckless” and a threat to the economy.

‘Big state’

But as to whether Johnson was signalling a radical shift in Tory policy, the jury is out.

History professor Richard Vinen, from King’s College London, suggested the prime minister knowingly used a famous quote that had been “wilfully taken out of context” over the years.

“The ‘big state’ is certainly a move away from the Thatcher legacy,” Vinen, who wrote the 2009 book “Thatcher’s Britain”, told AFP.

“But of course Thatcher used the state at certain times,” he said, citing her “war cabinet” during the Falklands conflict with Argentina in 1982.

Politics lecturer Ben Williams, from the University of Salford, said the Covid-19 crisis gave Johnson “the chance to decisively remould and reformulate the Conservatives’ attitude towards ‘society’.”

Another former Tory prime minister, David Cameron, tried to launch his “Big Society”, with austerity putting paid to government claims Britons were “all in this together”.

Williams wrote on The Conversation website that Johnson “now seems to be recognising that this crisis is a moment to formally discard one of Thatcher’s most negative legacies from his party’s image”.

But for all the emphasis on a collective struggle, Vinen said the extraordinary economic measures were likely to have “mind-boggling long-term consequences” for years to come.

Finance minister Rishi Sunak has already hinted higher taxes could off-set the intervention, prompting fears the people being praised now could pay for it in future. — AFP