—Margaret Thatcher (1925 – )

Margaret Thatcher’s term of office as British Prime Minister (1979 – 1990) reshaped many aspects of British politics. Her legacy remains as controversial today as when she first sought to implement it. One aspect of her agenda was a return to individual responsibility: the state could not and should not seek to provide all the needs of the individual. Rather, older virtues, such as hard work, law-keeping, and faith are of central importance if a culture is to thrive. And it is these virtues, she argues, that England’s children need to learn.

We have come through a strange period—a period when traditional and tested values were set aside in favour of sociological theories divorced from experience.

Twenty years of social analysis and woolly political theory have been aimed at trying to “prove” that crime and law-breaking are not the responsibility of the individual, but are the fault of social conditions and society. The older language of morality and legality, of right and wrong, is conveniently forgotten. While we must do everything we can to improve social conditions where they are bad, the truth is that crime grows where the pressure of established values and conventions is removed.

Children must be taught what is right and wrong and the religious basis of those values. That is not “indoctrination,” but only a practical recognition of the truth that while a mature person may reject the faith in which he has been brought up, a child will find it difficult to acquire any faith at all without some instruction in the discipline of belief and practice.

Once the law and its moral basis is humbled, all else that is valuable in a civilised society will vanish, usually with frightening speed.¹

Footnotes:

from Kairos Journal

Perryville’s First Baptist Church is located on Route 40, 1 1/2 miles east of Route 222, across from the Principio Health Clinic.