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POSITIVE RSVP ONLINE ONLY:
http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/events/williams.html
The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs will host a Director's Seminar with Rt. Hon. Baroness Shirley Williams of Crosby, Member of the House of Lords and Public Service Professor of Electoral Politics Emerita at Harvard Kennedy School, in the Belfer Center Library (L369).
Baroness Shirley Williams of Crosby is one of the “Gang of Four” who dramatically left the Labour Party to form a new political party, the Social Democratic Party.
Shirley Williams was born in 1930, became the first woman General Secretary of the Fabian Society in 1960, and in 1964 was elected MP for Hitchin. She was a member of the Wilson and Callaghan governments in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating as Secretary of State for Education and Science and Paymaster General in the cabinet from 1976 to 1979. She lost her seat in the 1979 election.
By 1980 the Labour Party, in her view, was veering into left-wing extremism, and in 1981 she co-founded the Social Democratic Party as one of the “Gang of Four”. She became the first MP elected for the SDP in a 1981 by-election in Crosby. From 1982 to 1988 Shirley Williams was elected President of the new party. Shirley Williams strongly supported the merger of the SDP with Liberal Party into what was to become the Liberal Democrats.
Shirley Williams lost her seat in the 1983 General Election following boundary changes. She became Public Service Professor of Electoral Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School from 1988-1996. She has lectured at Cambridge, and in Princeton, Berkeley and Chicago in the US.
Shirley Williams was married to the late Professor Richard Neustadt, a leading expert on the US Presidency.
She was appointed to the House of Lords in 1993 and served as the Party’s spokesperson on Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in the Lords from 1998 to 2001. In 2001, she was elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, serving until September 2004. She became adviser to the Prime Minister on nuclear proliferation in 2007, has been a member of the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiation (NTI) of Washington DC for over ten years, and is the only British member of the International Commission on Nuclear Disarmament and Proliferation and chairman of judges for the National Teaching Awards. She published her autobiography,Climbing the Bookshelves, in 2009. She is a Belfer Board Member at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School.
As space is limited for this event, RSVPs will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. Belfer Center Seminars are strictly off-the-record. By requesting to attend the seminar, you agree that you will comply with the Belfer Center's strict policy against recording or disclosing the contents of the seminar. Your access is conditioned on your compliance with these restrictions. Should you violate these rules, the Center will pursue all available legal options and you will be excluded from all future events.
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