Leadership Quote by Shirley Williams

Risk is the politician's favorite alibi, and Shirley Williams flips it into a dare. "There are hazards in anything one does" nods to the obvious: policy has fallout, reform creates losers, leadership attracts blame. But the second clause is the blade. By insisting that "doing nothing" carries "greater hazards", Williams reframes caution as a choice with its own costs - moral, social, electoral. The line is designed to puncture the comfortable myth of neutrality: in public life, stasis is not a safe harbor; it is a policy of drift.

The craft is in its balanced structure. The repetition of "hazards" makes action and inaction comparable on the same scale, then the comparative "greater" shifts the burden of proof. If you're going to defend the status quo, you now have to argue that passivity is less dangerous - a harder case to make when crises are visible. It also works as a permission slip for imperfect decisions: outcomes may be messy, but the mess of neglect will be worse.

Williams' political context matters. As a prominent centrist reformer who broke with Labour to co-found the SDP, she understood that the riskiest move can be refusing to accept a stagnant script. Read against Britain's cycles of economic strain and institutional recalibration, the quote is both justification and warning: democracies decay not only from bad choices, but from leaders who mistake hesitation for prudence.