Shirley Williams: ‘Breaking the Mould’?

Shirley Williams was probably the best known and most popular social democratic ‘pro-European’ politician of her times. This chapter discusses how her mother and father, in different ways, and her early life, formed in the shadow of both world wars, shaped her politics. It shows how her pro-Europeanism was an indelible part of those politics, developing in relationship to arguments in the Labour Party that did not always fall neatly along left-right lines. Williams left the Labour Party in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party. That, added to the fact that she did not seize leadership of the SDP, led to the view that she and the SDP missed the opportunity to ‘break the mould’ of British politics by making electoral reform impossible to avoid. However, Williams’ greatest contribution to pro-European politics was probably her role in the 1975 referendum, notable and indicative by its absence in the referendum of 2016.