William Clouston, the Leader of the Social Democratic Party, has served at Restore’s advisory board and entered the SDP into an electoral pact with Reform at the 2024 general election. With the two parties now bickering, can the SDP rise from the ashes? With the political landscape shifting to the left on economics and the right on social issues, why has it not done so yet? And when has the left lost its way, anyway? Cyril Davydenko speaks with William Clouston about this, and more.

Cyril Davydenko: I believe you joined the SDP in 1982. Were you a member of the Labour Party before the 1981 split? And if so, why did you decide to follow the Gang of Four?

William Clouston: I wasn’t! I wasn’t old enough. My father was a member of the Labour Party, and he was a founding member of the SDP, and he influenced me a great deal.

I was too young to join the party in ‘81, but I joined the year afterwards. I was involved in it from the start and continued my membership right until 1990, when Owen left the stage and most people thought the SDP was finished.

Cyril: I guess what makes the SDP unique is that, unlike the majority of British political parties, it did not move towards the liberal end of the spectrum in the last 30 years. In fact, it has become less liberal — not to say conservative, but certainly less liberal on the questions of Europe or immigration.

Would you say you yourself underwent a similar sort of political and philosophical journey, or were you always on a more social-conservative end of politics?

William: That’s a great question. In the 80s, I was pretty much a conventional Owenite in the SDP. I was pro-common market, pro the European Union. I was also pro-social market and pro-election reform.

Although I — like a lot of other Owenites, my father was the same — had reservations about working with the liberals, because we thought they were rather weak and wishy-washy.

In hindsight, we were right, because liberalism is a different political philosophy to social democracy anyway. The alliance we had in the 80s revealed a split in the SDP between liberals like Roy Jenkins, who was a former Chancellor and very prominent UK politician and former President of the European Commission — who was the first leader of the party — and people like Owen, who were more patriotic and nationalistic in their outlook.

Cyril: Some people describe the SDP as ‘Blue Labour’ or ‘conservative socialist.’ I suppose it’s in the name, it is a social democrat party, but these words acquired a particular meaning in the current political discourse. Would you say they’re at all accurate descriptions?

William: I think it’s increasingly difficult nowadays to articulate what a political programme or a party is in these terms: left, right and progressive, liberal or conservative.

It’s very, very difficult because the terms are used in different ways in different places. Particularly in the United States, the word liberal is used differently. The word left is used so synonymously with progressive liberalism that any hope that I would have to make a strong case for, say, the traditional left of people like Peter Shore or Ernest Bevin. Most people would not grasp their patriotism, wouldn’t really understand the limits to the social side or the state side in their thinking.

I’ve tried to make it clear that there are ‘red’ and ‘blue’ elements to the SDP in the same way that Phillip Blonde’s Red Tory project had ‘red’ and ‘blue,’ although I think we’re a little bit more different from them than from Blue Labour. Both Blue Labour, Red Tory and us, all of these things have elements of red and blue.

One of the things I’ve always tried to emphasise very strongly indeed is that we tend not to split the difference in the SDP.

You won’t really find very much centrist type split the difference policy. The red bits of the economic programme and what the state should do are pretty red. Way to the left of the Labour Party. We want a very strong state, but just in the realms, just in the domains that the state should be competent in.

I’ll give you some examples. A state that doesn’t have a competent plan to generate and supply the energy grid at the right price for industry is a state that’s failing.

A state that sells off its water industry to private entities that use it as a debt mule and extract profits overseas is not very sensible.

The state should have a role in creating housing. I don’t think expensive rents or expensive housing is socially useful for the family or the country.

However, we’ve never argued, and you won’t find any record of us arguing for a big state at all, as the latest Green Paper, ‘The investment state,’ demonstrates.

We’re very sceptical of the growth of the entitlement state. I don’t think the sort of active state we would want would just dish out billions and billions of pounds for people to do nothing. So the blue bits are pretty blue.

We’re better social conservative than the Tories have been. We’ll wait and see what they do. But we know what a woman is. We defend the family in cultural discourse constantly, which is the foundation of society. We are very sceptical of mass immigration.

One of the mistakes that people can make about the SDP is to imagine that it’s some sort of centrist party. It isn’t really. It’s a complementary, coherent blend of red and blue.

Cyril: And yet, numerous commentators have claimed that there is this gap in the market for a socially conservative, but economically left-wing political force. Why has the SDP failed to make electoral gains in this climate where there is this gap in the political market?

William: When David Goodhart helped me write one of our papers, he pointed out that this is the hidden gap in British policies.

And it’s true, it’s still the gap and it still exists.

I think what’s been a challenge for the SDP is the rate of growth that we can achieve. The party was almost on the point of extinction when that took over.

The number of parliamentary candidates we’ve had and fielded in general elections has gone up from 20 in 2019 to 122 . And we’re hoping for a full slate next time. That’s normal growth for a party in British political history.

We’ve only had four occasions in the last 120 years when a party has basically come up from scratch and become a national party, or reasserted itself: the Labour Party, the post-War Liberals, the Greens and UKIP. It usually takes about 20 years.

Most of our difficulties in the SDP are just sheer resources. We’re one very, very good funder away from correcting that. And that’s a priority for us this summer.

I used to be coy about saying what our plans were. I’m not coy anymore, because I think we do need to reach out. And if anyone is interested, then we’d be very happy to speak to them.

I think the demand for this type of politics is still there, but on the supply side, we struggle to get it to the public.

Cyril: A few months ago, some people were speculating that Reform was going to be this sort of red Tory party before, of course, they made Robert Jenrick their spokesperson for the Treasury. And he has doubled down on what many are calling a Thatcherite approach to economics.

William: I know Reform pretty well. I negotiated a general election pact with them last time, with Richard Tice and Paul Oakden, something no one’s done before

I also have good links in Rupert Lowe’s party, Restore.

The jury on this red-blue mix is out.

In Reform, members are united on one thing only — immigration. If you go to a Reform meeting in South Yorkshire or Kent and ask about immigration, it’s the same. But, if you go to a Reform meeting in South Yorkshire, you probably get a different attitude towards economics and state action than you would in Kent.

I don’t believe that Reform’s ideas and policy is yet a very good fit to the economics that those voters want. Danny Kruger is probably on my side on this, and I think probably Matt Goodwin is as well. Farage has always been a Thatcherite. Tice has been pretty Thatcherite, although, when the chips are down, he understands the importance of geostrategic security.

So, to be honest, the flippant thing is to say that I don’t know what the trade policy of Reform is, because they don’t have one.

Cyril: Let’s do a thought experiment. If there were no mass immigration since, let’s say, 1997, what would we be talking about?

William: Today, the economy and immigration vie for top spot.

The problem is, when you dive down into what your trade policy should be, or how protectionist you should be, or what are the consequences of de-industrialisation, it gets a little bit granular for what you might call retail politics.

And yet, British people have an instinctive sense of the cost of decline. People can see the insanity of trying to run free inadvertent commerce trade with China. If you don’t do something you will have no industry at all. I suspect the older leadership in Reform and Restore is uncomfortable with these facts, but I they are economic facts.

Cyril: Do you think that what we’re talking about is unique to Britain? I am thinking of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany or Le Pen in France. Is there something unique about British politics that really hasn’t allowed, in the last forty years, for this discourse to break through, and why is there such a big difference between Britain on the continent?

William: Sahra Wagenknecht’s party is economically pretty close to what we’re thinking of. It’s interesting why it hasn’t gone a little bit further.

Maybe it is that, for a long time, anyone suggesting the state should have an active industrial policy was always met with: “well, you can’t pick winners.” Now look at British Leyland.

Anyone saying that the state should reduce the cost of housing would be met with, “well, look at the brutalism of the flats.”

Both of those things are not good examples of why you shouldn’t do something. We could build as well as the Dutch do we you wanted to. But the vehemence of reaction to anyone saying the state could do anything useful has been so huge here that I’d say Britain is quite unique in this respect.

I’ll give you an example of how the thinking is different here, say, to France. Britain pioneered nuclear power in the 50s. By the late 60s, the French caught up with us. We let our own nuclear industry decline to the extent that, when New Labour got in and Cameron got in, they closed British Nuclear Fuels and were just running the thing down. But by the time of the Coalition Government, we had to ask the French to build Sizewell and Hinckley.

Do you honestly believe the French state would have asked the British to build their nuclear power? It would be totally preposterous. It would be totally unthinkable.

Cyril: I would imagine they would find it embarrassing.

Wiliam: Yeah. So that’s the indifference to what is made where and who owns what. They don’t care where anything is made and they don’t care who owns anything.

No sensible industrial economy would do this. The Japanese wouldn’t do it, and they wouldn’t be indifferent to their major industrial assets being sold to foreigners either. Why is Britain so uniquely indifferent?

Cyril: Now, the SDP’s policy on immigration is very unorthodox for a left-wing party. When and why did the left change? When did they transition from nationalism to humanism?

William: I don’t think resistance to open labour markets is right-wing: I think it’s probably left-wing, odd that it may sound.

George Brown would never have advocated an open labour market because an open labour market decreases the price of labour and it disincentivises training. There is nothing social-democratic about it. It is not in the interest of your workers to have to face competition from states that have much lower wage rates.

But I take your point entirely that the left as it’s described now is effectively a progressive idea.

Cyril: When did progressivism take over the left?

William: I think there were progressive elements in the Labour Party certainly by the early to mid-70s.

In fact, most of the things that people would describe as sort of insane wokery now, and all the race baiting, you’d find that in the Haringey Labour Party of the 70s. It was even there in the Labour Party manifesto of 1983 — it had this element of a coalition of minorities and Peter Shore, my greatest political hero, criticised that manifesto the week after losing that election.

A proper left-wing program unites people behind a unity of purpose. Shore described it as a terrible thing to imagine that you could have a successful political unifying platform on the basis of an alliance of minority grievances, and he was right! Because there’s nothing uniting about it all, it only creates more division.

What’s also interesting is what happened to how the traditional left approaches national ownership of energy, water, rail and housing.

Virtually all of those ideas have been washed away in the last 40 years.

Once you take something off the table you render it impossible to advocate. You’ll end up with the situation we had, which is when Blair won the ‘97 general election with a big majority, then won again, and at no point did the Labour Party of the Blair years try to build nuclear power stations, build housing at scale or renationalise rail or water: they accepted the Thatcher settlement, and then went on.

Cyril: Given the recent failures of the state, what gives you the confidence that your programme can be delivered effectively even if you won?

William: There has to be a complete sea change in how Whitehall operates. The era of comms and policy experts, too much of that must go. What you have to get back to is an era where the legal impediments to doing something are removed. Impediments have to be just removed. It’s fairly brutal. Matt Kirtley, who writes for , one of his phrases is, ‘if brute force isn’t working, you’re not using enough.’ Our approach will be a much more engineer than comms expert.

Most of us in the party have actually built a few things. I’ve developed several hundred houses myself and a few supermarkets and roadside schemes. I have 40 years’ experience of building things. The head of regeneration in the SDP, his CV is phenomenal as an engineer, not just with housing, but with rail and other things.

You have to have a totally, utterly different attitude to what the state does, how economically it can do it, how quickly it can do it. That’s what we’re arguing for.

One of the things that you need to introduce to the public sector is, if you’re not working, you might get the sack. Too many politicians of the progressive left are primarily interested in protecting people instead of the nation.

Cyril: How do you convince people to vote for what some will portray as against their short-term interests, despite it being in the national interest?

William: I see that. If the structural incentive for a majority of British people to take more from the state than they contribute continues, it actually will threaten democracy itself in the end.

Increasingly people realise this, though. On something like the Triple Lock, any politician defending this Triple Lock is innumerate. If it ratchets up at the highest rate of one of three metrics, it detaches itself from the tax base that’s meant to support the pension system.

There’s a growing number of people, particularly the people that are called the 6am class, who get up and work, who are fed up with seeing their neighbours who sometimes don’t work having a standard of living which is quite equivalent to them. That can’t happen.

If you gain all four major benefits, you’ll be on a disposable income that’s about four or five thousand pounds a year higher than someone working full-time on a minimum wage. There shouldn’t be anyone in that category, in my opinion. No one.

The point we make in the latest green paper is that it’s absolutely urgent that we explain that growth is downstream of investment. If you collapse and cannibalise public investment, you won’t have any growth. It’s not that difficult to understand why, when you look at the data, chart four in the green paper tells a story:

Source: ‘The investment state’ by the Social Democratic Party, April 2026.

 

Our rhetoric to those who want to continue in this delusional fantasy of spending more than you’re earning: if you believe that, then I’m afraid we have nothing for you.

Cyril: So, if you could implement only on reform from the SDP manifesto, which one would it be?

William: I would end mass immigration. I think it’s the one thing that covers so many things economically, and so many things socially, and so many things culturally. Our addiction to mass immigration is so destabilising and so damaging that I think it is the single thing that would improve the morale of British people who are trying to build their lives here. If they are to have a chance of security and economic success, we must end this multi-year addiction to mass immigration.

Cyril: Is there any country, or more than one country, that perhaps not perfectly represents what you stand for, but has implemented much of what you want to see done in Britain?

William: In theory, this country is Britain post-war. Not entirely. The Attlee Government, if you look at the post-War national economy that was built from 1945 to, say, 1970, rates of growth were very high. It was highly productive. It was culturally very effective. There was a baby boom. It really was better than people say it was, and what happened after was certainly worse than people say it was.

Wouldn’t it be exciting if you had a state that was prepared to build 24 nuclear reactors? Designed by ourselves.

Intelligent observers of the SDP’s programme, constantly go back to Singapore. The People’s Action Party, Lee Kuan Yew, and in particular the undervalued Finance Minister, Goh Keng Swee, are the people who we usually look to for inspiration.

The problem is that Singapore is very much misunderstood. I don’t think you can transport policy like a sort of fairground grabber and drop it into Britain. Unless you have a sort of rules-based Confucian orderly society like Singapore, you can’t do a lot of what they did. If you just said, right, we’re going to do what Singapore does and apply it to Manchester, it wouldn’t really work. So I would say, funnily enough, the country we can learn from is post-War Britain. And then Singapore.