Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It - with Sam Freedman
Wednesday 11 September 2024, 13:00 to 14:00, Zoom
In his bestselling new book, Failed State, Sam Freedman outlines how it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore. It has become harder than ever to get a GP appointment. Many property crimes remain unsolved. Rivers are overrun with sewage. Wages are stagnant and the cost of housing is increasing. He asks why it feels like everything is going wrong, at the same time?
It's easy to blame dysfunctional politicians, but the reality is more complicated, he says. Politicians can make things better or worse, but all work within our state institutions. And Failed State argues ours are utterly broken.
At this event in our Fair Society series with the Policy Institute at King’s College London, Freedman – a leading policy expert and writer of the UK’s most popular politics Substack – offered his analysis of how our governance has fallen behind and what can be done to pave the way for a fairer and more prosperous Britain.
Speakers
- Sam Freedman, author of Failed State and writer of Comment is Freed
- Polly Curtis, Chief Executive, Demos
- Emma Norris, Deputy Director, Institute for Government
- Duncan Robinson, Political Editor and Bagehot columnist, The Economist
- Bobby Duffy, Director, the Policy Institute at King’s College London (Chair)
Event summary
Sam outlined the three big trends from recent decades that he thinks have made it so hard to run the country:
- Centralisation (to Whitehall, undermining the capacity and power of local government and then overwhelming central government to the extent that it has no capacity either to deal with big strategic issues or to deliver, and is reliant on poorly performing and unaccountable outsourcing companies; but also within Whitehall, with an overmighty Treasury filling the void of a weakened Number 10 post-Blair to the extent that spending controls are the only strategic driver of decision-making in government)
- Scrutiny (the executive avoiding scrutiny from the legislature through tricks like timetabling changes in parliament and over-use of secondary legislation, leading to poor quality law-making, forcing both the Lords and the courts to become more involved in improving or challenging legislation; and less effective and robust internal scrutiny by the civil service in response to increased hostility to civil servants from government ministers)
- Media (‘comms has eaten policy’ in reaction to the 24/7 news cycle and social media, such that politicians are incentivised to govern through constant policy announcements rather than developing effective long-term policies, while changing media consumption habits have reduced the money available to hire specialist policy correspondents, leading lobby journalists to report on policy issues as well as politics, but with a focus on the political aspects of policy, further incentivising the government to focus on meaningless announcements rather than effective policies)
Key issues raised in the panel discussion and audience Q&A:
- There’s a broader problem of low trust and confidence of citizens in the state, which is self-perpetuating, because if politicians don’t feel trusted to make tough decisions, they will be inhibited and won’t act boldly to improve things
- Devolution is messy and creates winners and losers (but arguably is better than the status quo, which mostly creates losers all round)
- We’re stuck in a cycle of superficiality and short-termism, with lots of people in Whitehall and Westminster who are good in crises but less on long-term projects
- Number 10 is too focused on the detail and not enough on strategic leadership
- People in government matter as well as the systems, and we need to incentivise and support Ministers to make good, bold and often difficult long-term decisions
- We need a better approach to evidence; Ministers talk the talk but really want policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy, while civil servants sometimes stifle innovation because of a lack of ‘proper’ evidence
Solutions suggested by Sam and the panellists included:
- Devolving more power (e.g. to mayors)
- Having a more coherent (and limited) approach to outsourcig
- Giving the legislative function of MPs more status and power
- Making MPs more representative of the population
- Involving citizens more in policymaking
- Raising more money from taxes and spending more on local government
- Giving Ministers more control (e.g. powers to appoint special advisors)
- Focusing government on long-term missions to provide strategic clarity