An electoral fix alone won’t save Britain’s progressives. Agreeing principles might | Martin Kettle

The death of Shirley Williams is a reminder that balancing capitalism and social justice is still the key task we face

To the end, Shirley Williams always described herself as a democratic socialist. In her 2009 autobiography, easily one of the best political memoirs of her generation, she describes a lifetime spent “trying to hammer out a compromise between capitalism and social justice, a compromise that might attract enough public support to be viable”. It is a carefully constructed sentence that still defines the key task facing progressive politics in modern democracies.

Yet Williams, who died on 12 April aged 90, has now gone without achieving her goal. The compromise that might have attracted enough public support to be viable eluded her to the end. In the same way, it has also eluded many other progressives, not just of her generation, not just of her party, and not just in Britain. But it is a dream that refuses to die.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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