In April, one of my political heroes, Baroness Shirley Williams of Crosby, gave an interview for my website www.politicsjunkie.co.uk
With the LibDem conference in full swing, I have decided to republish that interview here on the blog. As you would expect, Shirl the Girl talks sense from beginning to end.
Part 1
Shirley Williams has been in Parliament, on and off, for over 40 years, first as a Labour MP, then briefly for the SDP and finally as a leading LibDem peer.
She clearly still loves the job - her interview with politicsjunkie was delayed when she realised she wanted to make a point about Iraq in the Lords.
Despite not being in a visible role since she stood down as LibDem leader in the Lords, she is still a well known figure in Britain:
"Comprehensive education and the creation of the SDP - those are the two things people remember about me – oddly enough most people remember one or the other but not both."
When she returns from the chamber we settle down in her box-strewn office and politicsjunkie asks how a political animal like Williams adjusted to the pace of life in the Lords:
"I enjoy politics very much so I enjoyed the Commons – I found the House of Lords a bit quiet at first, but when we got to the situation where there was no overall majority, when the great bulk of the hereditary peers went in 1998, that changed the House of Lords into a much more interesting place than the Commons.
"I don’t miss the Commons. Most of the time I was there I was an opposition MP and the government of the day had huge majorities - that frankly makes the House of Commons a dull place.
"The outcome of almost every vote is known. It's only if you get a substantial rebellion on the part of the governing party that you actually have an interesting Commons where things are fluid. Basically it becomes a rubber stamp."
The recent history of the party she helped to found has not exactly been tranquil. As a senior party figure she was privy to the growing problem at the heart of the LibDems:
"I was aware that Charles had an alcohol problem. I spoke to him about it well before it became publicly known. What I am aware of is that if you have an alcohol problem then you have to give it up totally – its no use just having a few drinks on the side.
"I also know that the culture of politics is one that makes that extraordinarily difficult. I think he was in many ways a brilliant leader – the way he appealed to young people was very striking, the fact that he had no pomposity was remarkable.
"At the end of the day there were too many public occasions when Charles couldn’t handle it because he was under the influence of drink. It was becoming more and more evident to the media."
Williams rejects suggestions that the party had been ruthless and brutal in their removal of Kennedy:
"Actually the Liberal Democrat party behaved with extraordinary restraint. Charles had a problem for at least two years before anyone made it public and the party effectively covered up because they so appreciated the good things he had done.
"They really became quite worried and some of us who were, as it were, senior figures in the party became quite worried. In the end we came to the conclusion that Charles simply had to stand down."
Williams is no stranger to political turbulence. Born Shirley Catlin in 1930, she was the daughter of political scientist Sir George Catlin and the novelist Vera Brittain, best known for her World War 1 memoir 'Testament of Youth'. Young Shirley was heavily influenced by both her parents, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic - her mother was a leading pacifist during the Second World War.
While studying at Columbia University in New York she met Bernard Williams, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Shirley returned with him to Oxford and they married in 1955, despite her brief affair with four-minute-miler Roger Bannister.
Williams worked for the Financial Times as a journalist, gave birth to a daughter and lived happily in Kensington with her husband. She became a Labour MP at the age of 34, winning Hitchin in the 1964 Labour landslide, and was an immediate star, becoming a junior minister.
In 1974, her marriage was dissolved - the athiest Bernard had grown distant from the religious - and increasingly ambitious - Shirley. That year she was appointed to the Cabinet by Harold Wilson as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection.
When Wilson was succeeded in 1976 by James Callaghan, she became Secretary of State for Education.
Williams will always be identified with the creation of comprehensive education, though much of the groundwork had been laid by her predecessor, Tony Crosland.
She is not impressed with the bill that the current secretary of state now finds himself piloting:
"I find the education proposals appalling. They're an attempt to bring the market to bear on education – as they are trying to do in the health service. These are both areas where the customer is captive – you can't choose to have healthcare – ditto with education – it’s a compulsory process you can't not have it.
"It's absurd to think that the market would operate in the normal way it would operate for cosmetics or soups. That means that your customer is in an extremely weak position.
"It's much more effective in my view to deliver a public service where there is accountability to parliament and government, not to try to deliver a market service where the providers have got something close to monopoly power.
"Where the education white paper is terribly weak is that it rests the whole of the non-selective principle on an admissions code which is even now not statutory. It’s a terribly weak protection – it means if the Tories get back in they can sweep it away just overnight.
"They are building a hierarchy of secondary schools, protected by what I can only call the codpiece of an admissions code. But within the system the pressures are all the other way – the academies want the brightest kids, then the specialist schools want the next brightest kids, then after that the trust schools.
"In every case the pressure will be to satisfy the sponsor – these are private business interests and there is no guarantee that their first concern is education. There is no system of sifting or enquiring into, no system of interviewing these people.
"Some of them are very curious people."
Curious people is an apt description of the gaggle of mis-matched Labour MPs who rocked the party in 1981.
Williams had lost her seat in the 1979 election and was disgruntled with the extreme leftists who seemed to be taking over the party. Moderate Labour MPs were being deselected from their constituencies by Militant socialist activists.
Something had to change and in 1981 Williams resigned from the party, along with fellow moderates Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, to form the SDP.
Later that year, following the death of Tory Rodney Graham Page, Shirley Williams won a by-election in Crosby in Merseyside, becoming the first SDP MP to be elected.
The SDP rocked the political establishment, at times hitting 25% in the polls. The Labour party reacted by swinging even further to the Left under Michael Foot while Thatcher's right-wing market-led policies became more strident. The SDP seemed the sane alternative.
Williams was elected SDP president but lost her seat in the 1983 general election. The party had failed to make a breakthrough at the ballot box, despite the unpopularity of Labour, who lost 3 million votes, their worst result since 1918.
The Falklands War had buoyed up support for the incumbent and the SDP revolution was stalled by an unfair voting system. The SDP-Liberal Alliance was a mere 675,985 votes behind Labour, but won only 23 seats with 25% of the vote.
Williams supported the party's subsequent merger with the Liberal Party in 1988, to become the Liberal Democrats.
The SDP/Liberal Alliance may never have lived up to their early promise but they changed the Labour party. The Limehouse declaration reads like a new Labour manifesto - taking on union power, a healthy private sector, a constructive role in the EU, the elimination of poverty.
By 1997, new Labour were in tune with many of the LibDem values. Use of the market where appropriate, regional assemblies, independence for Scotland were all policies the Liberal Democrats supported.
If new Labour started out looking like the SDP, where did it all start to go wrong?
"Round about 2002 the whole thing started going pear-shaped. The unbelievable levels of intervention in the public services from this government.
"A new law virtually every few months in the Home Office, reorganising every bloody thing, reorganising the police forces, the schools, the hospitals. Not once but twice and in some cases three times, with the result that we have got a demoralised and totally confused public sector that doesn’t know if it is coming or going."
continued in PART2
