Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It
Freedman (Sam)
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Contents

    Introduction: The Crisis Cycle – 1
  1. Overloaded – 21
    1. No Ninjas – 23
    2. Enemies Within – 59
    3. Contract Killings – 93
  2. Overpowered 125
    1. Democracy Bypass – 127
    2. Enemies of the People – 163
    3. Civil War – 195
  3. Overdrive 227
    1. The Random Announcement Generator – 229
    2. High Speed Crash – 257
    Conclusion: Ending Our Crisis – 291
    Acknowledgements – 305
    Notes – 309

Introduction
  • In January 1974, Sir William .Armstrong, the Head of the Home Civil Service and one of the most powerful people in the country, was found rolling around on the floor of the No. 10 waiting room babbling incoherently about the imminent end of the world.
  • The next day he locked all his permanent secretary colleagues, from across the civil service, in a room and told them Armageddon was coming. Then he went into the office of Victor Rothschild, a somewhat shadowy adviser to the prime minister, Edward Heath, and explained his plans for ‘the Red and Blue Armies’ he seemed to believe he controlled. He told another colleague that he was a reincarnation of the seer Tiresias, a blind prophet of Greek mythology.
  • Armstrong was quietly dispatched to Rothschild’s mansion in Barbados to recover from this nervous breakdown. By the time he returned Harold Wilson had replaced Heath as prime minister and consented to Armstrong taking up a role outside the civil service as chair of Midland Bank.
  • Sir William’s breakdown was precipitated by one of the worst post-war crises to hit the British state. A combination of spectacularly misconceived economic policy and conflict in the Middle East led to a rapid increase in inflation and a brutal recession. A miners’ strike left the country without enough coal. Heath was forced to implement a law that forbade non-essential companies from using electricity more than three days a week. Television stations were shut down from 10:30 p.m. to conserve energy. It got to the point where ration books were distributed to motorists and columnists wrote about a possible military coup. Heath, refusing to settle with the miners, was forced into an early election, which he lost.
  • Armstrong, who was often called the real 'Deputy Prime Minister' due to his influence over Heath and his habit of appearing alongside him at press conferences, buckled under the pressure. He was trying to run the civil service while also acting as the prime minister’s main economic policy adviser as inflation rose inexorably. The prices and incomes policy, through which the government tried to rigidly control the economy failed. The miners’ strike felt like a test of authority that the government could not back away from but also could not win. It was too much.
  • I asked Sir Robin Butler, who was working as Heath’s private secretary at the time, and later ran No. 10 for Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, whether it was the worst crisis he had experienced in government.
  • ‘No,’ he said, ‘every crisis is a crisis in a different way ... I don’t think any of them outweigh the others.’
  • One of the great dangers of writing a book about contemporary politics, especially when it has this title, is the declinism trap. We have a natural human tendency to focus on the problems of our times and the triumphs of the past.4 When we look around us at the detritus of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, an economy that has been stagnant for over fifteen years, failing public services, record levels of child poverty, overcrowded prisons, sewage in our rivers, and endless series of cancelled trains, it is hard not to think that we have never had it so bad. By contrast previous eras can be fondly imagined as ones where ministers were dedicated public servants, the cream of the crop, aided by a Rolls-Royce civil service, calmly managing challenges in the public interest.
  • This is, of course, not true. Modern British history is better thought of not as a story of decline but of a repeating cycle of crises that are eventually resolved, only for a new one to appear. The destruction of the Second World War ran into ongoing rationing, then Suez, the inflationary misery of the 1970s, the social decay of the 1980s and so on. Things have usually seemed bad, and sometimes terminal. As Sir Robin said, though, every crisis is a crisis in a different way.
  • Eventually the challenges of a given era get so bad that a dam breaks and a way of doing things that has become accepted as inevitable, or too hard to change, gets washed away. These dramatic moments happen roughly every forty years and often, by resolving the biggest contemporary problems, create the conditions for the next crisis cycle.
  • In his book The Death of Consensus, the historian Phil Tinline looks at these turning points and the conditions required to trigger them: ‘Democracy means that any unthinkable new idea has to go through a long trial before it can be sufficiently established for a government to win power and act on it. The dispelling of an old nightmare, the destruction of an old taboo, takes a lot of back-and-forth wrangling between the established orthodoxy and the new contender. While that is happening, things look bleak, and frightening.’
  • My argument in this book is not that we are at the worst point in our history — we have dealt with bigger challenges in the past — but that we are reaching the end of our current cycle. Right now things look bleak and frightening, but our moment of change is due. How painful that transition will be depends on correctly diagnosing the particular crisis of our times.
  • The crises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by questions of democracy itself. The Reform Acts and the fight for control between the House of Commons and Tory- controlled House of Lords provided the dramatic moments of resolution. In the mid-twentieth century, the demands of a newly enfranchised population combined with the grinding poverty of full industrialization, and a very limited welfare state, led to a social crisis. The key politicians of the era from Attlee to Macmillan and Heath were scarred by the social failures they had witnessed in the 1930s, and were determined to avoid another round of mass unemployment at any cost.
  • The society they oversaw saw steady economic growth and the rapid expansion of the state, symbolized by the creation of the NHS in 1948. But their collective embrace of what seemed like the modern innovation of economic planning through central control, alongside a complex web of exchange controls together with prices and incomes policies, led to the next wave of crisis. Industrial relations, especially with trade unions in nationally owned sectors, deteriorated. The first Wilson government was fatally undermined by its failure to limit union power. Heath, as we have seen from Sir William Armstrong’s story, was brought down by it. In 1976 Britain was subject to the indignity of an International Monetary Fund bailout after coming close to running out of money altogether.
  • This was another dam-breaking moment that forced a dramatic moment of change, driven initially by James Callaghan’s chancellor Denis Healey and then, more forcefully, by Margaret Thatcher. The legacy of Thatcher is complex and will be a frequent focus for this book. Some of her economic reforms were unnecessary, others were needed but were not backed up with sufficient support for those who lost out. But they did end that crisis cycle.
  • And they helped create the cycle we are now in. The initial crises of the British state were ones of democracy; the mid-century ones were those of social conflict; and the 1970s and 1980s of economic upheaval. The one we are in now is a crisis of governance.
  • We have plentiful problems but they do not feel unresolvable, or terminal, as they did during some moments of these previous crises. We know at least some of the reasons we have low economic growth, such as a severe lack of investment in infrastructure, planning restrictions, a crazily incoherent tax system, and high levels of regional disparity. We know what it would take to have a well-functioning hospital system. It is easy to forget that public satisfaction with the NHS was at its highest level not much more than a decade ago. There is no fundamental threat to democracy, no imminent IMF intervention, no world war (not yet, at least).
  • Our problem is the total failure of our political institutions to deal with the more limited challenges we have. Britain’s constitution has always been an oddity among developed countries. None of our institutions were designed but rather 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 the prime minister, to the appointment of the cabinet, to the status of the opposition, and the powers of the speaker, it is convention all the wav down.
  • This system has always led to difficulties caused by the lack of safeguards. It is almost fifty years since the senior Conservative politician Lord Hailsham popularized the term elective dictatorship’ to describe the enormous power held by a government with a majority in the Commons. This is a result of having an almost entirely ceremonial head of state in the monarchy, an extremely weak and unelected second chamber in the House of Lords, a main legislature whose timetable is controlled by the government, and a judiciary that, by convention, follows the laws as laid down by that legislature. Constitutional scholars like Vernon Bogdanor and Peter Hennessy have been documenting these challenges, both real and theoretical, for many decades. As Bogdanor noted in 1995, we have ‘a very peculiar constitution which no one intended . . . whereby the government of the day decides what the constitution is.’
  • Over the last forty years, first gradually and then suddenly, these innate pressures, compounded by other factors, have caused our institutions to fail. Three trends, examined in the three main sections of this book, have caused an already troubled system to gum up completely and leave us with a crisis of governance.
  • The first section - Overloaded — tells the story of how the British state became one of the most centralized democracies in the world. And how, as a result, it is simply trying to do far too much through institutions, like No. 10 Downing Street and the Treasury, that do not have anywhere near the capacity or capabilities to cope.
  • As Rupert Harrison, who was George Osborne’s most senior adviser throughout his time as chancellor, put it to me: ‘The core weakness of the British state is the constant chopping and changing and the inability to stick to any long-term strategy, whether that’s industrial policy, public sector reform, tax policy . . . compared to other European countries, in particular, we're just hopeless at sticking to anything . . . We’re incredibly vulnerable to a new government or new minister coming in, wanting to reinvent the wheel, ripping up what came before . . . There’s just this irresistible range of levers and a desire to fiddle.’
  • This is primarily a story about England. As each of the four parts of the United Kingdom came together they kept some devolved powers and unique characteristics. The Blair government significantly extended those powers. But England, which dominates in terms of population and economy, and focus for the Westminster government, has always been highly centralized since it first came together under Anglo-Saxon monarchs. Local government has, therefore, always been weaker than in most other developed countries. And in the last forty’ years it has been almost destroyed by successive, highly centralizing, Whitehall administrations.
  • The overload trend, though, is not just about the centre taking powers away from local government but also the increasing complexity of issues they have always been responsible for. Some of this is because the world has become more complicated: digital regulation, for instance, was a lot simpler before the internet took off.
  • Changing technology increases expectations. When Spanish Flu broke out at the end of the First World War the government did not, and were not expected to, have a pandemic preparedness strategy. There were no vaccines, not any possibility of them, nor would lockdowns communicated quickly at national scale have been plausible.
  • Better awareness of risk and a greater desire to stop problems before they happen has led to a vast array of new public bodies and regulators overseen by ministers. The so-called ‘regulatory state’, monitoring everything from school and hospital performance, to environmental standards and adherence to equality law, has exploded in size over the past forty years. Concentrating power at the centre of government, and destroying state capacity outside of it, while at the same time massively increasing the scope of what government covers, is a core reason for our policy paralysis.
  • The loss of capacity has also meant an increasing reliance on outsourcing and the use of private companies to provide taxpayer- funded services. This is reasonable enough for services that are easy to measure and for which there is a proper competitive market, like cleaning or rubbish collection. But we now routinely use it for exceptionally complex services with no existing providers. As a result a handful of outsourcing companies have become inordinately powerful, despite repeated scandalous failures. Likewise some of our most important services like children’s homes and social care are delivered largely by private companies, many of whom are owned by private-equity firms extracting enormous profits from stricken councils unable to challenge them.
  • Section two - Overpowered - tells the story of how the British government became the most dominant of any Western democracy at the expense of both Parliament and, ultimately, the British people Parliament is supposed to represent.
  • Executive dominance is not a new phenomenon. As we have seen, Lord Hailsham was worrying about it in the 1970s. It is a function of the way British democracy evolved. By the early twentieth century the monarch’s role had become almost entirely ceremonial, with full executive power shifting to his or her ministers. Then with the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, the Commons achieved dominance over the Lords.
  • From then on, a prime minister with a majority in Parliament, who could keep their own party on board, was one of the most powerful elected officials in the world. Most democracies have a network of inbuilt checks and balances. This can be a head of state with meaningful powers; a second chamber that can block legislation; and/or a judiciary with independent responsibility for safeguarding a written constitution. We have none of these things. In addition, the executive are nearly all appointed from within the Commons, so only three quarters of MPs are primarily focused on their parliamentary role.
  • Checks and balances can create their own problems. At the other end of the spectrum to us, the United States has so many that stalemate between different branches of government has become the norm. Watching the President and Congress spend months trying to reach agreement on raising the debt ceiling, which allows the country to function, does not seem a good advert for constitutional complexity.
  • But Britain is a real outlier in having very few real checks at all and that puts an unusual amount of pressure on the government to behave appropriately - and on the Commons to scrutinize their performance and any laws they put forward. As William Gladstone famously put it, the British constitution ‘presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and the good faith of those who work it’.
  • That good sense and good faith has always been lacking. David Lloyd George’s government was more openly corrupt than any in recent years and avoided censure. Anthony Eden outright lied to Parliament about collusion with the Israelis in advance of the Suez crisis but was never sanctioned. Since the formation of the modern party system, whipping MPs to vote for government legislation regardless of their own doubts about its merits has been standard. Indeed, rebellions against the whips have actually become more frequent over the past few decades, and Parliament more willing to challenge government.
  • But governments have reacted to this challenge by trying to shut it down, through a whole series of parliamentary rule changes and inappropriate use of existing powers. In doing so they have made House of Commons scrutiny of a majority government exceptionally difficult. As a result the Lords have had to spend more time trying to unravel poorly constructed laws, but as they are both relatively weak and conscious of being unelected, they have not been able to act as much of a defence. Instead we have seen the courts get more involved in politics, quite explicitly as a defence against an overpowerful executive. But judges are often not best placed to make decisions about inherently political topics, nor does our constitution make the balance of power between them and the government clear.
  • Ultimately lack of scrutiny leads to worse laws and governments failing to achieve their own goals. It is easy for ministers, even if they are acting in good faith, to think they are better off taking short cuts but the reality is that problems just emerge when it is too late. In recent years many ministers have not seemed interested in trying to achieve concrete real-world goals at all.
  • Likewise the civil service is supposed to take forward government polity, regardless of whether individual officials agree with it, but they are also supposed to challenge bad ideas and present alternatives for ministers to decide on. But here, again, we have seen governments try to shut down scrutiny, and take a paranoid approach to any pushback. As a result, scrutiny has weakened, and an ever more centralized government has taken advice from ever fewer people. Governments have also taken to appointing partisans to key public bodies like the Charity Commission and Ofcom, to insulate themselves from independent thought.
  • In the final section we turn to how the pace of politics has gone into overdrive, creating a terrible environment in which to make good decisions and a destructive set of incentives for politicians.
  • At the heart of this storv is the media and, as with the other two trends, the often baleful presence of powerful and unaccountable press barons is hardly new. Partisan and scurrilous pamphlets appeared alongside the early glimmerings of democracy in the seventeenth century. Richard Littlejohn and Sarah Vine are tame compared to Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. As media became big business in the late nineteenth century, ownership of newspapers fell to wealthy businessmen who wanted to exert influence over politicians.
  • But if these rows aren’t new, the frequency and intensity of the relationship between media and politics shifted dramatically in 1989 when Parliament was televised for the first time and Sky launched 24-hour rolling news. This was followed by another revolution with the arrival of social media in the late noughties. The consequences have not all been negative. Higher levels of transparency have improved the behaviour and work rate of politicians, on average. Conspiracies of silence, such as when Churchill’s team covered up a serious stroke he suffered in 1953, would be much harder these days.
  • Most of the changes, though, have been harmful to good government. Firstly, decisions need to be taken much faster under a lot more pressure, which rarely ends well. Secondly, managing the insatiable appetite of modern media leads to terrible incentives to make far too many announcements, which are often poorly thought through. Given the already severely limited capacity of central government, the time spent on media management crowds out space for good policy-making. As Camilla Cavendish, who ran David Cameron’s Polity Unit in No. 10, put it: ‘Walk into No. 10 and the ground floor is essentially the cabinet room, the prime minister’s office and an enormous comms operation. And that tells you the priorities of any government.’
  • Social media has accelerated these trends and perpetuated an ‘always online’ culture across Westminster. Everyone in politics is now constantly bombarded with information, judgements and requests. It is rare to have a conversation with a politician or adviser that is not punctuated with regular looks down at the phone. It is a bad habit I learned as a government adviser and have never quite been able to drop.
  • Beyond the news, the rise of social media abuse has, more than any of the other trends explored in this book, led to making politics a deeply unpleasant job with high rates of burnout. It is particularly true for women and people of colour who are on the receiving end of regular misogynistic and racist abuse, but it applies across the board. It also adds to the feeling politicians have always had of being under constant attack, which again leads to worse decision-making, and an obstructive and defensive mentality.
  • We can see the malign effects in the growing number of younger MPs standing down in preference for less miserable and more lucrative careers. Likewise, of the many potential MPs I have spoken to who have decided against running, fear of relentless abuse is the biggest reason given for choosing to stay out of elected politics.
  • These three trends — hyper-centralization; executive dominance of an ever bigger and more complex state; and a superfast media cycle - are bad enough in themselves but combined together they are a brutally toxic mix. We have seen power over everything captured by a handful of people who can’t cope with what they’ve taken on, while at the same time scrutiny has been deteriorating and the incentives for those people have been skewed ever more towards communications rather than policy.
  • Each trend exacerbates the others. Centralization in government has not only overwhelmed ministers and civil servants, but also Parliament, who now have to deal with far more legislation than ever before. The intense pressure for announcements has made this even worse as governments now regularly introduce unnecessary legislation, which has no other purpose but to make news, to keep the media beast well fed. The consequent lack of scrutiny makes centralizing more powers both easier to do and more attractive. The rapidity of decision-making in a world where the news cycle is essentially operating in real-time leads to even more instability in services that have been centralized. It is a horrible mess.
  • A common problem with books like this one is that they spend a lot of time focusing on problems and have a thin chapter at the end with a few anaemic suggestions for improvements. I have tried to avoid this by focusing throughout the book on positive counter-trends that might be developed. The final chapter pulls together these approaches into a plan for reform. It is a more radical plan than I imagined proposing when I started research on this book, but through doing so I have come to the conclusion that incremental improvements are not enough. We do need change on the scale of universal suffrage; the post-war expansion of the welfare state; or the economic revolution of the Thatcher years.
  • It has to start with a wholesale restructuring of the state to shift power down from Whitehall to regional government. Without doing this we will never see our cities outside London achieve their potential. Nor will central government ever be able to cope with the status quo. Fiddling around with central government machinery - by, for instance, strengthening No. 10 and providing better support to the prime minister - could certainly help but it would not solve the underlying problem of them simply having too much day-to-day responsibility.
  • Devolution of power would also mean devolving scrutiny down to the level of local democracy too, rather than local elections just being an opportunity to punish the national government of the day. Just as it would give the government more breathing space to think about big strategic issues, it would give Parliament the space to scrutinize the areas left under national control. There would also be genuine local representation so MPs could focus less on constituency issues and more on the big picture.
  • Devolution needs to be accompanied by a constitutional overhaul to strengthen Parliament and close loopholes exploited by the worst of our political class. MPs should be legislators above all else, and selected for their ability to scrutinize government decisions and behaviours. Doing this means making the MP role itself more attractive so that people do not see ministerial office as the main purpose of a political career. A stronger Commons would take the pressure off the Lords, which could also be strengthened, while maintaining its role as an expert scrutiny body.
  • There is no way to reverse the pace of modern politics, though governments could make their lives easier by constructing a political calendar that put less stress on set-piece events, from which the media have come to expect a slew of announcements. But a government with fewer responsibilities, and subject to more oversight, would have more space, and more incentives, to make good decisions. Stronger local government would lead to more local media, especially if national government did more to siphon advertising funds towards it, more likely to cover issues that are actually relevant to people’s lives rather than the latest bit of Westminster gossip. And while there are, rightly, strict limits to how much government should interfere with the press, there are ways to increase transparency and limit bad incentives.
  • I have spoken to a huge number of people for this book. This includes dozens who have spent time at the top of politics in the institutions I focus on: cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, special advisers, local government leaders, policy experts and political correspondents. But in the course of my day job writing about policy I’ve also heard from numerous doctors, nurses, teachers and others struggling on the frontline of our failing state, and lots of ordinary people let down by it too.
  • One question that repeatedly came up is whether we are in a unique situation. Many of those who needed the most convincing were experts from other countries. To us, Britain looks in a bad way and is underperforming other developed states. But citizens of every country have a much better view of their own problems, while imagining things work better elsewhere. Indeed, elements of the UK system that I am criticizing can look attractive from abroad.
  • If you are an American watching another deadlocked Congress fighting with the President then executive dominance does not seem too bad an idea (until you ask them about the consequences of a completely untrammelled Trump administration). A German politician in national government frustrated at their inability to reform public services without getting states on board might welcome the prospect of centralization. And someone living in an actual failed state like Somalia or Syria would be entitled to wonder what on earth we are all complaining about.
  • But these things are all relative. When I talk about the British state failing I mean institutions that did once broadly work no longer do so. That is very different from never having functioning institutions to start with. Our standards of living may be slipping down the global rankings, but we are, for now, still a rich country, with the ability to rapidly improve things if there is the will to do so. As the great economist Adam Smith calmly replied to the news of a British army defeat during the American War of Independence, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’.
  • As for the US, the Netherlands, Germany or anywhere else, I do not want to pretend that they are utopian paradises that we should be attempting to copy. Every country has its own problems, its own historical context, its own crisis cycle. But ours do seem particularly bad. Taking purchasing power into account, the average Brit is considerably poorer than their Western European counterparts, let alone Americans. On current trends this will be true of Slovenia soon and Poland by the end of the 2020s. While many of the problems I talk about are true across rich countries, we are outliers in having a government so powerful and with control over so much. While we might not want to swing too far in the other direction, and find ourselves with the problems other countries complain about, we do need to rebalance.
  • Fellow Brits I have spoken to had less difficulty in accepting our system was broken. But some told me that in blaming our problems on institutional failure I am letting our current crop of politicians off the hook. The Tory-leaning version of this blames our woes on the last Labour government for increasing indebtedness in the run-up to the financial crash, allowing house prices to shoot up, and encouraging unprecedented levels of immigration that drove an inevitable populist backlash.
  • The Labour version argues responsibility lies with reckless Tory austerity, compounded by the self-inflicted injury of Brexit and the breathtaking incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The far left think all the mainstream parties are to blame for their embrace of neoliberal economics; the radical right that we are overrun by a ‘new elite’ obsessed with wokerv and identity politics.
  • I am certainly not claiming that the individuals in charge, the ideologies they hold, and the decisions they take, do not matter. But I do argue that we have the politicians we do because of the system we have. We have an entire incentive structure that selects for qualities unrelated to the ability to govern well. No doubt many MPs, of all parties, are genuinely motivated by a sense of public service, but they are not the ones who will necessarily get to the top. Sometimes people who do have the ability to govern well will find themselves in positions of power but this is, too often, a matter of luck.
  • Even when more talented people find themselves in power, they are trapped in institutions that do not work, and bad systems beat good people every time. Every prime minister, after a short period in Downing Street, realizes how few effective levers they have. Depart-mental ministers nearly all feel trapped in a battle for resources and status with their cabinet colleagues, even when they are well aware that collaborating on issues would help. They usually appreciate the efforts of their civil service teams but feel like they lack policy advice, and often know they are not being effective.
  • As Helen MacNamara, who was one of the most senior civil servants in government before leaving in 2021, put it: ‘[There is a huge] gap between what people think government is and what it actually has become in practice. It’s really easy to say, it’s this useless minister or that bad SPAD. You can have, rightly or wrongly, as many opinions as you’d like about them as individuals. But actually the structural foundation, the underpinning of the way our government operates, has become so different to what people imagine it to be.’
  • Senior officials are profoundly frustrated by this. At the highest levels they have, like Helen, left in droves, with dozens of people lined up by previous cabinet secretaries to be the next generation of leaders now working in the private or voluntary sectors. The ones who remain are increasingly despondent that things will get better. Leaders of organizations that work with government - pressure groups, charities, think-tanks - share war stories of the incompetence and absurdities they have to endure daily. As do all of us who are unable to get a hospital appointment or see another list of cancelled trains when we arrive at the station.
  • In short, absolutely nobody is happy with the current state of affairs. No ideological grouping feels like it is getting its way. Libertarian Tories have seen the tax burden rise to record levels and the planning system grind to a halt. Fiscal hawks have seen debt levels increase to peaks unimaginable a few decades ago. Social conservatives have watched on as net migration has hit numbers well beyond previous records. The centre-left has seen public services weaken, in some cases to the point of collapse, and basic standards of government overturned. Child poverty is at record levels, and homelessness is on the rise again.
  • The one thing everyone does seem to be able to agree on is that the system is broken. Even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said as much in his 2023 party conference speech: ‘Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had thirty years of a political system which incentivizes the easy decision, not the right one. Thirty years of vested interests standing in the way of change. Thirty years of rhetorical ambition which achieves little more than a short-term headline. And why? Because our political system is too focused on short-term advantage, not long-term success. Politicians spend more time campaigning for change than actually delivering it.’
  • This is from the leader of the party that had been in charge for most of that period. Sadly, he did not make any attempt to change the culture he criticized in any meaningful way. In that very speech he announced an extremely short-termist decision to cancel the second leg of the HS2 rail project with no proper consultation or plan.
  • But a prime minister who wanted to could make a big difference. Politics does not work the way it should. But it could. It would just take focus on the real problems and a genuine sense of long-term perspective given much of what is required involves giving away power and control, the opposite of what Sunak did. The opportunity to be the next Lloyd George, Attlee or Thatcher is there for the taking, and our recent set of prime ministers have clearly fallen well short.
  • Beyond personal qualities, though, beyond even the distorted incentives which drive political success, there is another reason why fixing our system of governance is ignored: it is seen as something for nerdy Westminster obsessives.
  • You see this attitude all the time, even from knowledgeable commentators who are well aware, on one level, of all the problems I have described. And, of course, there is truth to this. A focus group will get far more animated talking about issues like immigration or capital punishment than the role of Parliament or local government structures. A radio phone-in producer looking for callers will get more joy with a request for views on the state of the NHS or schools than the role of statutory instruments or judicial oversight. But that just means these issues are complex, hard to decode, and hidden from most people. The average level of interest in national politics is, not unreasonably given everything I’ve said, extremely low. But this does not mean these issues are unimportant. In fact, they are often the root cause of all the other problems that people do get exercised about.
  • Issues of governance and constitutional failure are inherently abstract and, to most of the population, impenetrable. Persuading people that the structure of government, or the way ministers timetable legislation, is the ultimate cause of their pay packet not increasing in a decade, or their inability to get a GP appointment, or sewage spewing out onto the local beach, is a hard sell. That makes the crisis self-reinforcing in a way previous ones were not. As things get worse, the more likely it is that the very suggestion of focusing on what can seem like arcane 'Westminster bubble’ issues is dismissed. MPs will not even vote to repair the building they are sitting in for fear it would seem self-indulgent.
  • But as in 1911, 1945 and 1979, the crisis has reached breaking point. Faith in politicians and our political institutions has collapsed to record lows. The pollster Ipsos have been measuring levels of trust in different professions for forty years. Politicians are now at 9 per cent. Even estate agents get 28 per cent. People have no faith in our institutions’ ability to fix anything - and they are right. They may blame the individuals rather than the system, but it is within those individuals’ power to change the system.
  • No doubt many of the people who work in and around Westminster will be shaking their heads at the thought of trying to make progress on some of these issues, thinking ‘it’ll never happen’. The assumption is that governments, even if they hint at reforms like the ones discussed in this book in opposition, will never give away power in practice, and never strengthen the ability of others to hold them to account. But resolving a crisis cycle requires overturning a previously fixed orthodoxy. Whether it takes two years, ten or twenty, eventually a government will realize they cannot achieve much with broken institutions. And we do not have twenty years.
Book Comment

Macmillan; Main Market edition (11 July 2024). Hardcover.


Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
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