William Clouston, SDP leader, has announced he'll be standing in the Clacton by-election, framing his campaign around a simple line: Britain is not a shop or a charity, it's our home. In this episode of Broken Custodians, recorded shortly before William announced his candidacy, he talked about these core themes and how short-term thinking — in government, industry and the home — has been ruining Britain’s future.
Public investment in Britain has collapsed from around 6% of GDP to just 1.7%, and the industrial base has shrunk from 30% to 9%. This week we're joined by William Clouston to ask why — and to make the case that the same short-term thinking has been failing us and our children across a myriad of policy areas spanning education, housing, infrastructure and technology.
William is sceptical of the AI boom sweeping the US. He compares the mania for the biggest tech firms to tulips and railway stocks, and expects a serious crash within the next year or two. Closer to home, he's more concerned with what AI is already doing to how we and our children think — in particular lamenting how universities are turning a blind eye to students using AI to generate coursework, and explaining why he believes it risks corroding our country’s ability to create original work at all.
On children’s relationship with social media and smartphones, William has no time for half-measures. These products are addictive the way alcohol and tobacco are, he argues, and the only policy that will actually work is restricting children’s access to the devices themselves. He goes further still, suggesting that social media is more closely related to heroin or crack cocaine than cigarettes.
He points to British assets being too readily up for sale, calling out Thames Water and football clubs loaded with debt while private (often foreign) interests walk away with healthy profits. And he derides the decades in which successive governments have allowed our public housebuilding capacity to wither, which he sees as central to the housing and immigration crises.
We're left wondering whether a political system so heavily calibrated for short electoral cycles can ever hope to solve problems that could take a decade or more to fix — and whether, as William suggests, the public may already be well ahead of the politicians on this.
Here is the full episode which you can also find on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts…
Broken Custodians is an UsForThem podcast and Substack https://www.youtube.com/@Broken.Custodians
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