Remember Margaret Thatcher on ‘society’? Thus:

And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

Howls of rage from many quarters. How dare she attack Society, the unfeeling selfish monster!

But look at this:

The analysis by the Conservative Party shows that funding for the Department of Health, its quangos and regional authorities reached more than £12 billion last year, a rise of 103 per cent since 2003. 
 
The £12.6 billion budget for central administration was seven the amount spent on either maternity services or dentistry, which each received £1.8 billion, or Accident and Emergency departments, which received £1.7 billion.

Billions more was spent on administration at hospitals and primary care trusts across the country, for which specific administration figures are not compiled.

Or this:

Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph reported that schools were being "swamped" by a tide of paper – 1.3 million words of advice and instruction sent out from Whitehall every year, covering everything from health and safety to lesson planning.

Alarming though it is, this deluge of paperwork is only a symptom of a wider problem. Successive governments have laboured under the delusion that they can "fix" our schools through ever more prescriptive policies.

Ministers and officials talk about "driving up standards", as though teachers and children were cattle. Targets are set, and quangos are created to meet them. The failure of one policy is merely an excuse for a dozen more.

And above all this:

In total, the Government has brought in 3,023 offences since May 1997. They comprise 1,169 introduced by primary legislation – debated in Parliament – and 1,854 by secondary legislation such as statutory instruments and orders in council.

Remarkably, Labour is creating offences at twice the rate of the previous Tory administration. During its last nine years in office, under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, fewer than 500 new crimes reached the statute book via primary legislation.

And the rate at which offences are being created is accelerating the longer that Tony Blair remains in Downing Street. In 1998, Labour’s first full year in power, 160 new offences passed into legislation, rising to 346 in 2000 and 527 in 2005.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, who uncovered the figures, said: "Nothing can justify the step change in the number of criminal offences invented by this Government. This provides a devastating insight into the real legacy of nine years of New Labour government – a frenzied approach to law-making, thousands of new offences, an illiberal belief in heavy-handed regulation, an obsession with controlling the minutiae of everyday life…

This Labour Government has done to more to devastate ‘society’ in the UK than any other. It has a shown a febrile, neurotic sense of trying to fix any piffling problem by greater standardisation, greater bossiness, greater central control, all with diminishing real accountability.

Why?

Because neo-collectivism has no real sense of society in all its subtlety. Rather society is simply the shrinking space which the government graciously gives to citizens to do things without (yet) intrusive oversight.

All this paid for by money nabbed from people who might be born one day, if state-funded abortion does not get them first.

A staggering failure of basic honesty, common sense and self-restraint.

This, ultimately, is what widespread US unease about Obamacare reforms is about.

Sure, the US government meddles furiously with its citizens’ lives. But there unlike here citizens can fight back.

And when they look at the reality of British life now in all its inglory and the impenetrable procedures under which the NHS decides what treatment you can – and can’t –  have as you get older, are people really wrong to say ‘Hell, no!’?