Most books about politics concern personalities or ideologies rather than systems. Sam Freedman’s first book sets out to be an exception, and he acknowledges at the outset that this comes with risks: “Issues of governance and constitutional failure are inherently abstract and, to most of the population, impenetrable.”
It’s more fun, in other words, bitching about wicked milk-snatching Tories than wading into the weeds of the relationship between the Treasury and regional government, or the effect of the “principle of legality” on the uses and abuses of judicial review, or statutory instruments and skeleton bills.
But, boring as they may be, Freedman says, we need to look at these things. It’s not – or not just – that Boris Johnson is a rogue, Liz Truss a maniac and Rishi Sunak a wet blanket that has got us where we are. The last half-century has seen a series of changes in the apparatus of government that have made it difficult if not impossible for even competent and well-intentioned prime ministers to do their jobs. Central government is at once overmighty and overwhelmed; perverse incentives abound; short-termism is rife; the levers of power aren’t properly connected to the machinery.
Freedman, a former policy wonk and ministerial adviser, lucidly sets out how we ended up here. Faced with a broken system, the instinct of government is always to do exactly what will make things worse: centralise power further, and further circumvent checks on executive authority. “Government becomes overwhelmed, reacts by trying to seize more control and further reduces scrutiny, makes things worse, and gets more overwhelmed.” It is “a toxic cycle”.
He supplies weep-makingly absurd instances of the results. Some, such as the money wasted by the outsourcing of state capacity in markets-that-aren’t-markets to Serco, Capita and G4S, will be familiar to most readers in broad outline if not in detail. Others, such as the way local councils spend fortunes competitively “bidding” for pots of central money, will be less well known. One 2022 study found “53 funds, all with different criteria and varying timescales and eligibilities, being offered by 10 government departments and agencies. Five levels of government are eligible to bid for or receive funding, with another 19 types of organisations eligible.”
The increasingly ferocious ding-dongs between executive and judiciary, Freedman argues, would cease to happen if the latter wasn’t forced to be a backstop against rushed and incoherent legislation, which requires better and more thoughtful law-making, which requires more thorough and less headline-chasing parliamentary scrutiny, which means, in turn, reforming the civil service and the role of backbench MPs. The tail-wagging-the-dog relationship between government and media is a big part of the problem, too.
Freedman apologises in his acknowledgments for failing to include the contribution of his teenage children – “Rishi Sunak is a knobhead” – because it “didn’t really fit with my systems focus”. Nevertheless, he does liven his analysis with the odd salty remark. Steve Hilton’s “big society” was “exactly the sort of amorphous and ill-thought-through idea you’d expect from someone who’s ended up as a talking head on Fox News”; Chris Grayling is “high up in the list of the least competent people to be given high office in British history”, and “having Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in charge will always make things worse”.
“People matter,” he concedes, “but systems matter more, and we will get nowhere until we fix our systems.” To his credit, Freedman has detailed suggestions as to how, notable among them giving devolved authorities proper autonomy and, crucially, tax-raising powers; beefing up the status and pay of select committee chairs (who help counter executive overreach) to rival that of ministers (who are creatures of patronage and therefore reinforce it); rebuilding state capacity, and outsourcing only when there’s a genuinely competitive market and outcomes are measurable. Plus, of course, the bread and butter of civil service and Lords reform.
It is, as he acknowledges, a huge task – but he argues that unless conventional politicians learn to give away power to retain it, there is something much nastier around the corner.
• Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman is published by Macmillan (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
