When the coalition government took over in 2010, Sam Freedman was employed as a special adviser in the education department alongside Dominic Cummings. The two were under constant pressure from “the grid” — the diary that centralises media announcements from across government in No 10 — to come up with policy ideas.
They mastered the art of producing meaningless press releases. There was, for instance, the announcement that head teachers would have the power to give pupils “same-day detentions” — a power they already had several times over. Cummings’s favourite, used more than once, was that Ofsted would be allowed to carry out “dawn raids” on schools that were gaming inspections, even though for most of the year schools are not open at dawn.
Neither of these ideas did any actual damage, but the anecdote is one of many illustrations, small and large, of the big point in Freedman’s book: that however talented and public-spirited ministers and civil servants running Britain may be, their efforts are doomed by a rotten system.
A herd of new books on the awful state of Britain has thundered into the shops over the past year. Clever chaps like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Torsten Bell, former chief executive of the Resolution Foundation and the new MP for Swansea West have each come at the problem from a slightly different angle.
Freedman, who since his time in government has worked in education policy and these days produces an excellent Substack newsletter with his father, the war historian Lawrence Freedman, regards governance as the source of the mess. He takes the view that a combination of the overcentralisation of power, the gutting of state capacity and the speeding up of the media cycle have ruined the way the country is run.
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Unusually for somebody who was a special adviser to a Tory government, Freedman fingers Margaret Thatcher as one of the principal culprits. She’s largely responsible for the privatisation and centralisation that he reckons have done much of the damage. The first put the state at the mercy of a small number of powerful outsourcing companies that have overcharged the taxpayer; the second has undermined councils, the part of government with which people come most frequently into contact.
Central government everywhere wants to grab power from local government, but in most countries the constitution stops that happening. Not in Britain, which lacks such rules, so over the past half-century councils have lost control of housing and most secondary schools while seeing their budgets slashed at the same time as demands on them have increased. For much of their funding councils are these days required to compete for hundreds of small grants that central government may or may not renew year on year. With little autonomy and budgetary time horizons that often don’t stretch beyond Christmas, councils haven’t a hope of running services sensibly.
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Politicians know that the system needs to be rebalanced, but as David Cameron discovered, a vicious cycle is at work. He wanted to shrink the centre, but found that so much capacity had been wrung out of councils that there was nobody to devolve power to. His Big Society programme was an attempt to shift power towards the “third sector”, but it was stillborn because charities don’t have the capacity either.
It’s not just that Westminster and Whitehall have gained power at the expense of local government; at the centre, the executive — the cabinet — has also gained at the expense of the legislature. That was sharply illustrated when parliament, which wanted a soft Brexit, lost the confrontation with Boris Johnson, who wanted a hard one, but the balance has also shifted in less obvious ways. The growth in the number of governmental jobs — there were about 150 ministers under the Tories — has increased the scope for governments to keep their MPs in order by offering or withdrawing preferment. Meanwhile, by handing out peerages to cronies, the executive has tightened its hold on the second chamber.
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The civil service, too, has been pushed out of the loop in recent years. That’s partly because ministers surround themselves with an ever-growing number of ever-younger special advisers rather than the civil servants on whom they used to rely to develop and deliver policy. But it’s also because of the hostility towards bureaucrats on the right of the Tory party. That’s a dangerous direction of travel, as the financial markets recognise: Liz Truss’s sacking of Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary to the Treasury, helped to precipitate the leap in bond prices that led to her defenestration.
All of the power thus acquired is centred on a terraced house in central London, which is neither structured nor resourced to cope. Ferdinand Mount, who ran Thatcher’s policy unit in the early 1980s, noted that she had a “tiny staff, considerably less than the staff at the disposal of a mayor of a major German city”. Tony Blair — the only prime minister whose approach to governing wins Freedman’s approval — built up the prime minister’s office, but Cameron dismantled much of the Blair administration, including the Delivery Unit, which was good at actually getting stuff done. So during the last government things were back to where they were under Thatcher. The Policy Unit, the bit of the operation that thinks about how the country could be better run, is in an attic — where, according to Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s chief of staff, “they feel like teenagers in the spare room”.
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As 24-hour channels and then the internet sped up the news cycle, managing the media has taken up more and more of the government’s energy. By the end of the Tories’ time in power there were 25 special advisers in No 10 dealing with politics and media issues, and 10 to 12 working on policy. Truss’s ascendancy to the premiership was an illustration of the shift in the balance from governing to giving the appearance of it. In a decade as a minister she had no policy achievements to her name, but was very good at getting herself into the papers, which was how she caught the eye of Tory party members, thanks to whom she became prime minister. In her short stint at No 10 she had a single 25-year-old policy adviser covering education, health and welfare — £500 billion-worth of public spending.
Freedman perhaps pushes his argument a little far. The shifts in power over the past few decades haven’t been only towards the centre and the executive. The growth in status and influence of parliamentary select committees has redressed the balance somewhat in favour of the legislature, the creation of the Supreme Court strengthened the judiciary, and devolution to Scotland and Wales represented a huge shift away from the centre.
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Some comparison with other countries would be helpful, to give readers a sense of the extent to which this country’s problems are the result of global trends such as the rise of social media, or of particularly British factors such as the absence of a proper constitution. Overall, though, it’s a persuasive argument brought to life by a generous supply of telling quotes and good stories from insiders, which make it both convincing and readable.
Freedman does not think Britain is a hopeless case. He identifies changes that could distribute power more widely and help the state work more effectively: among them sorting out the horlicks that is local government, beefing up the select committees to give MPs more power and reforming the system of appointments to the House of Lords. But the roots of the problem, in his view, go deep. For those who expect the new government to bring about swift change, it is not an encouraging read.
Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman (Macmillan £20 pp368). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
