“There is no primary poverty left in this country,” Margaret Thatcher told the Catholic Herald in 1978, five months before she became prime minister. “There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings” but such poverty is the product not of social policy but of “personality defect”. Almost two decades later, in her 1996 Nicholas Ridley Memorial Lecture, six years after she had been pushed out of No 10 by her own MPs, she insisted again that “poverty is not material but behavioural”.
In between those two speeches, during her 11 years in power, the reality of Thatcherite policies, of reducing the top rate of taxation while cutting benefits, of devastating manufacturing industry and destroying trade unions, led to a huge increase in both poverty and inequality though the 1980s.
