Sir Nick Clegg has never been short of vantage points from which to view power. After five years as Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government, he spent almost seven at the heart of Big Tech as Meta’s president of global affairs.
Now, in a recent conversation with Wilfred Frost on The Master Investor Podcast, he offered a bracing diagnosis of Britain’s malaise, a withering assessment of Silicon Valley’s culture, and a pragmatic take on how artificial intelligence and free speech should be handled in the years ahead.
Clegg’s fondness for Britain is undimmed, but his verdict on our current mood is stark. The UK, he argues, is “remarkably creative” for a “soggy, muddy island”, yet something has curdled. “It’s as if the country has fallen out of love with the future,” he says, lamenting a pervasive habit of talking down people and ideas. By contrast, Americans “celebrate success” in a way many Britons find “a bit frothy” — but which, he insists, creates its own momentum.
That cultural divergence is reinforced by economics and geography. When he was in Downing Street, Clegg notes, the GDP of Europe and the US was broadly comparable. Today, he observes, the American economy is perhaps 1.5 to 1.7 times larger — the product of faster rebounds after the financial crisis and the pandemic, stronger demographics, and the structural advantages of a continent‑sized market. Europe, for all its virtues, is a “trickier” neighbourhood.
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