Presumably nobody will ever know for sure what Margaret Thatcher meant when she said there was no such thing as society, and I can't see anyone reaching agreement on what David Cameron means now when he says that society does exist after all, and that it should be ‘big’. Or, presumably, bigger. Than what? Bigger than ‘no such thing’ is easy. And how do you measure society anyway? It bends the mind, this sort of stuff.
I am chairman of a civic society, it's the sort of thing GPs do when they stop being doctors. You can read about us on http://www.altonsociety.org.uk/ including the fact that ours is definitely a society we would like to be bigger. Size counts in a civic society. What's more we can measure it: we know exactly the number of membership subscriptions, and more to the point, the number of …