Failed State – Why Nothing Works and How We Fix it
By Sam Freedman, Macmillan, £20

FREEDMAN was until 2007, a member of the Labour Party, and has spent much of his working life at the heart of government, both as a civil servant in the Department for Education as a senior policy adviser to Michael Gove and as adviser to the leader of the then opposition. This, his first book, argues persuasively that the British government is not fit for purpose and explains in detail why. 

He is not a Marxist and offers no class analysis, but it would by asinine to dismiss his critique on that basis. He provides an incisive analysis of what is wrong with our present system from an insider’s viewpoint. He argues that modern British history is best thought of “not as a story of decline but of a repeating series of crises that are eventually resolved.” “Our problem,” he goes on, “is the total failure of our political institutions to deal with the [even] more limited challenges we have.”

Britain’s constitution has always been an oddity among developed countries. None of our institutions was designed but evolved incrementally, through precedent, convention and occasionally crisis. Many of the core blocks of our political system have no basis in law, from the role of prime minister to the appointment of cabinet, to the status of the opposition. 

In describing the enormous powers held by a government with a majority in the commons we have, as Lord Hailsham memorably put it, “an elective dictatorship.” The government of the day in effect decides what the constitution is. Over recent decades the innate pressures on this structure have caused institutions to fail and government to seize up. 

Freedman detects three main trends which he deals with in this book. 

In the first section he looks at how the British state became one of the most centralised of the world’s democracies.

Local government has always been weaker than in any other developed country and in the last decades has been virtually destroyed by successive, highly centralised Whitehall administrations. This process has seen central government take on almost all legislative and executive powers with which it is unable to cope. That is why we have seen increasing outsourcing and the use of private companies to carry out what should be government work. Today many of our most important services are being delivered by private companies, often owned by equity firms extracting enormous profits. 

Section two is about how British government has become the most dominant of any Western democracy at the expense of both Parliament and the British people. A prime minister with a majority in Parliament is one of the most powerful elected officials in the world.

In his final section, he looks at how the pace of politics has gone into overdrive, creating an awful environment in which to make meaningful decisions and offering a destructive set of incentives for politicians. Scrutiny of government is hardly existent; a powerful and unaccountable press sets the agenda and government too often dances to its tune. One of central government’s core weakness is also the constant chopping and changing and the inability to hold to any long-term strategy.

Centralisation and executive dominance of an ever more complex state, plus media pressure for rapid decision-making has become a toxic mix. Power over everything has been captured by a handful of wealthy individuals, while scrutiny has deteriorated, as we have seen during the recent scandals about freebies and the purchasing of influence in the new Labour government and among its MPs.

Freedman also argues that the way MPs are selected and how they function has little to do with their capability of governing — seduced by dreams of becoming ministers, trammelled by party whips and executive threats, they are incapable of doing their ostensible job of properly representing their constituents. “We have an incentive structure [for MPs] that selects for qualities unrelated to the ability to govern well,” he writes.

Almost everyone, even Rishi Sunak, agrees that the system is broken, even if his idea of broken may not be the same as ours. In his 2023 conference speech, he said: “Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had 30 years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one. Thirty years of vested interests standing in the way of change.” 

Finally, Freedman puts forward suggestions for radical change: a restructuring of the state and powers away from Whitehall. But it is when he examines solutions that the book becomes pie in the sky. He somehow imagines that government will reform itself. In 1911, 1945 and 1971, he says, the crisis reached breaking point but temporary solutions were found and these only led to more crises.

Although he consulted and interviewed many people for this book, they all appear to come from the Establishment; they include no trade unionists or anyone from the left. 

However, despite those caveats, Freedman’s book provides a significant contribution to the discussion of the urgent need to reform Britain’s failed governmental system.