When Individualism Became a Crowd
Britain’s story of decline is often told in the language of economics - stagnation, inflation, inequality - a lexicon of measurable decay. But beneath those measurable losses lies another, harder to name and harder to fix: the erosion of belonging. The factories have closed, the unions have thinned, and the great institutions that once gave shape to public life have crumbled into consultancy contracts. Yet the deeper loss is invisible - the slow unravelling of a collective pronoun. Britain has not only lost its industries; it has misplaced its we.
What remains is not chaos but loneliness - distilled into anger, then moulded into meaning by those who trade in grievance.
When Margaret Thatcher declared in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society,” she was not prophesying collapse but prescribing order - an order without obligation. Her vision was radical not only in policy but in metaphysics: a world where the self was sovereign and community merely arithmetic — the sum of private ambitions. Thatcherism did not just liberalise markets; it liberalised the soul. Thatcherism didn’t just liberalise markets; it liberalised the self.
From that revolution emerged a new moral citizen - disciplined by aspiration, seduced by autonomy. Britain learned to measure virtue in independence, to see dependence as weakness, not fact. Fleetingly, it felt like emancipation. Home ownership climbed, consumer choice multiplied, and the self-made striver became the republic’s saint. But freedom, once unmoored from fellowship, curdled into exposure. The scaffolding that had once cushioned the individual - trade unions, civic clubs, councils, congregations - was stripped away or hollowed out. Risk became personal, not shared. What had been security became self-help. The moral language of duty gave way to the managerial dialect of efficiency. And without the connective tissue of mutual care, liberty began to feel like abandonment.
Populism did not rise from ignorance but from inheritance. It was born from the wreckage of a promise - that the individual, freed from dependence, would find dignity. Instead, he found precarity. The self-made citizen, having internalised the creed of autonomy, discovered himself alone, exposed to forces he could not master. What Thatcherism atomised, populism collectivised - but around grievance, not solidarity.
The “ordinary Briton,” endlessly invoked by politicians, embodies this inversion. Once a figure of quiet dignity, he is now a cipher of resentment - a moral placeholder defined by who he is not. Against him stand the cosmopolitan, the migrant, the elite. Populism does not reject individualism; it weaponises it. It converts private frustration into public hostility. The self remains the protagonist, but now as victim, not hero.
Britain has become a country of paradoxes: connected yet isolated, vocal yet unheard, proud yet hollow. We celebrate diversity while recoiling from difference. We worship freedom but mourn community. What ties these contradictions together is a culture that taught its people to measure worth in separation.
Decades of individualist storytelling have left us materially rich but spiritually poor. Even compassion has become conditional - filtered through the question of deservingness. Are the poor working hard enough? Are the migrants legal enough? Are the unemployed trying enough? Care has been replaced by audit; mercy by metrics.
The cost is visible in statistics that read like a national obituary. Loneliness afflicts one in seven Britons. Trust in institutions - and in each other - has collapsed. The welfare state, once an expression of collective decency, has become a bureaucratic labyrinth policed by suspicion. “Community” survives mostly as nostalgia, not practice.
Zygmunt Bauman once warned that individualisation without solidarity creates “freedom’s corpse: the right to be alone.” Britain is living among its remains. Populism feeds on this emptiness - not as a cause, but as a symptom. It offers belonging without mutuality, the illusion of community sustained by shared outrage. It feels like fellowship but functions as a fracture.
We call it polarisation, but the divide is moral, not ideological. On one side stand those who believe society still exists - that citizenship entails obligation. On the other hand, those who believe every person stands alone, answerable only to the market or to fate. This fracture cuts through parties, generations, even families. It shapes how we see welfare, migration, taxation - not as policies, but as parables of virtue and vice.
And in the absence of a shared moral story, politics becomes theatre - a contest not of vision but of blame. The right calls the left naïve; the left calls the right cruel. The centre, drained of conviction, speaks only in managerial platitudes about competence. What vanishes in this quarrel is meaning.
Repair will not come from management. It demands a reimagining of moral community - a rediscovery of what freedom owes to fellowship. The task is not to resurrect the solidarity of the past but to invent one that fits the plurality of the present.
It begins with language. When politicians speak of “hardworking families,” they imply that only certain lives are worthy of protection. When newspapers call strikes “chaos,” they turn collective action into a menace. The vocabulary of empathy has been replaced by the syntax of efficiency. To notice this is the first step toward renewal.
We need new words for connection - not the sentimental unity of slogans, but an honest grammar of interdependence. Freedom must be redefined not as escape from others, but as participation with them. A moral society does not eliminate conflict, but one that contains it within a fabric of care.
Britain’s populism is not just rebellion against elites; it is rebellion against loneliness, the spiritual crisis of a culture that mistook independence for meaning. The market can measure price but not purpose. The nation can guard borders but not belonging. To speak again of society is not nostalgia. It is resistance against the slow unravelling of a story that once bound us together, and against the lie that we can live alone.
