Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped men to its will, government […] covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform. – Alexis de Tocqueville, The New Despotism
Long before Dominic Cummings smashed his way through our institutions another high-powered political advisor-cum-guru promised to transform the British state – his name was Steve Hilton. Although Hilton is now a Trumpian Fox News pundit, in 2012 he found himself in Whitehall, preaching political revolution. Hilton’s first target was the civil service. In the nineteenth century, Hilton reportedly declared, Britain had run a global empire with only 4000 civil servants, but could somehow not even govern the British isles with several hundred thousand (almost 500,000 by June 2024) and all the technologies available to the modern state: something had to change.
Hilton’s statistic was wrong, and his anti-bureaucratic crusade ill-suited to the actual problems facing the country, but it captured a certain prevailing sense, as widely held now as twelve years ago, that even as the British state has ballooned in size, cost, and power, it has become less and less effective, culminating in the seemingly unending mood of crisis which has engulfed the British state since 2020. But, as Sam Freedman, himself no fan of Hilton, argues in his arresting new book Failed State, this crisis is one of our own making and stems from the overriding breakdown of a fundamentally flawed set of institutions and a constitution teetering on the edge of failure.
Despite his hyperbolic title, Freedman does not think that the present crisis is unique in British history, or that it is anywhere approaching the political upheavals surrounding the birth of British democracy and the rise of the welfare state, the Second World War, or even those faced by Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, and Thatcher in the last century. Indeed, in his introduction Freedman is oddly sanguine that Britain might readily right the ship of state and set course back towards prosperity.
But, Freedman argues, the challenges facing Britain today are the product of the last stage in the latest of a long series of ‘crisis cycles’, characterised by the gradual breakdown of the consensus which emerged from the resolution of the last ‘cycle’. In the 1970s and 1980s, the crisis was the breakdown of the so-called ‘postwar consensus’, which was resolved by Margaret Thatcher’s radically centralising governments. These administrations prioritised ‘sound’ economics and privatised large swathes of the British economy, whilst attacking trade unions, local government and any other alternative centre of power to Westminster. But the new synthesis which made it possible for Britain to emerge from the disastrous years of the 1970s is, on Freedman’s telling, exactly what has led us into the slow-moving disaster of the 2020s.
Indeed, somewhat surprisingly for a former Conservative SPAD, Freedman places much of the blame for the problems besetting Britain today at Thatcher’s feet. Although certainly not solely Thatcher’s doing, Freedman argues that the present breakdown of the system is far more the product of structural issues dating back to Thatcherite modernisation than it is to the particular, if severe, defects of a Boris Johnson or a Liz Truss.
That system is characterised in Failed States under three rough headings around which the book is structured, ‘Overloaded’, ‘Overpowered’, and ‘Overdrive’, referring, respectively to:
- The progressive tendency for all governments to centralise more and more power in Westminster, rather than in local governments or other subsidiary organisations, to the detriment of the state’s ability to fulfil any of its functions as it scrambles to meet all tasks at once.
- The slow-motion breakdown of parliamentary scrutiny and the mounting attack on the courts of the last few decades, which have exacerbated the already existing tendency for the British system to operate, as the Viscount Hailsham put it, as an ‘elective dictatorship’ in which all power is held by the executive.
- The changes wrought to our politics by ‘spin’, 24-hour news, mass social media adoption, a political class obsessed beyond reason with X.com and the ever-increasing tendency towards government by WhatsApp group chat, have created a political culture obsessed with announcing something – anything – every hour of every day.
Although Freedman presents these points in a definite order, in truth each has influenced and feeds back into the others, creating a hyper-centralised but directionless and frenetic politics incapable of ever actually doing anything and rapidly wasting administrative capital and squandering our state capacity.
This is as much a constitutional crisis as a political one on Freedman’s telling, stemming in large part from the unprecedented centralisation of governmental power in England since the middle of the twentieth century. In the wake of successive attacks, reorganisations, reforms, and visionary projects, England’s system of local government has been largely demolished and subordinated to the whims of the national executive.
But this has not led to the strengthening of Parliament or of Cabinet government. In fact, Freedman suggests that both have become weaker in recent years, in part because of a growing focus on MPs as local stakeholder champions in the face of declining local government. Further, Freedman maintains, MPs’ withdrawal from the effective exercise of legislative scrutiny has been concomitant with the executive’s remarkable revival of so-called ‘Henry VIII powers’ and an increased, and increasingly flagrant, use of statutory instruments to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue parliament in order to ‘get Brexit done’ in 2019 is the most notorious example of this tendency, but other egregious examples abound and are delicately exposed by Freedman. To give just one striking example, in 2023 the government elected to use a statutory instrument to amend the Public Order Act to reinstate provisions explicitly rejected by the House of Lords. At the same time, the cabinet has been further and further sidelined in favour of the political and bureaucratic operation around the PM.
Instead, authority has accumulated upwards, particularly in the dysfunctional centre of power around the Prime Minister in Downing Street and an increasingly powerful Treasury, wedded to an ‘arbitrary’ system of fiscal rules and an unbending commitment to fiscal orthodoxy, which Freedman badges under that perennial Westminster cliché ‘Treasury Brain’. Whether these two authorities work in tandem, as under Cameron and Osborne, or pursue competing policy objectives, as under the later Blair-Brown dyarchy, the effect is the concentration of policymaking and decision-taking in a tiny set of hands, even as the size of the government has rapidly grown.
And yet, contrary to the centralising vision of a Steve Hilton or a Dominic Cummings (against whose vision of rule by a ‘benignly-intentioned super genius seizing total power’ Freedman both implicitly and explicitly frames his book), this has not led to a more effective or ‘long-termist’ state. Quite to the contrary, Freedman contends that it is this centralisation which has produced our culture of scattershot government-by-announcement, as governments which try to control everything from bin collection to AI policy inevitably fail at managing any of them well.
Buffeted from crisis to crisis by an unrelenting cycle of news stories, the government now tinkers with every aspect of our lives, but without any force, purpose, or direction. Legislation has, inevitably, suffered with fewer eyes on it and tighter party management of MPs, leading to a sharp increase in the prevalence of judicial review and an ever-expanding role for the Lords as effectively a second draft machine for the unsuitable legislation written by the Commons. Along the way, Freedman provides a lucid account of how the generalist Northcote-Trevelyan civil service has become less and less suited to a changing and complex world. The whole legislative-policymaking system has, as a consequence, ground to a halt.
And yet the strange outcome of this is that even as the government has concentrated power in fewer and fewer hands, it has also abdicated more and more of the state’s essential responsibilities. As Freedman demonstrates in lurid detail, largely unaccountable actors now provide a myriad of services once run by national or local governments, and his book details unsettling examples of private contractors run amok, ranging from failing children’s services to the privatisation of the nuclear early warning system. In all of these cases, the taxpayer and the government absorb the risk whilst contractors reap the rewards, all the while providing – often substandard – services in essentially uncompetitive areas in which none of the advantages of the market can be enjoyed.
This, Freedman argues, is how we have found ourselves in the parlous conditions which Britain faces going into 2025; governed by an ever more powerful and centralised state, which grows less and less competent as it tries to deal with more and more problems for which it is essentially unsuited. But what is to be done?
Freedman’s answer is neither the traditional Tory view (reduce the state, privatise unnecessary government assets), nor the answer offered by the nascent Cummingsite vision of technocratic centralisation. Rather, with the exception of brief asides on subjects like limiting media monopolisation, increasing the power and prestige of select committees to empower parliament and making the civil service more flexible, Freedman’s chief recommendation is a radical transformation of British local government.
This is not, it should be said, the asymmetric, haphazard, devolution of Westminster bromides, about which Freedman is quite critical, or the old British federalist dream of ‘Home Rule All Round’ now championed by Gordon Brown, but something more like a proposal for Britain to adopt the multi-tiered system of local and regional governments administrated by local democratic authorities found in similar unitary and non-federal countries like France.
This would not mark a retreat by state authority, but its recalibration such, as Freedman evocatively argues in the conclusion to his book, that the central state could focus on big picture issues, ranging from national defence, to climate change, to economic management, whilst issues better dealt with at closer range are managed by regional governments, although he is a little vague on what this might mean. Will the welfare state be devolved down to these new regional assemblies? The NHS? If there is much to recommend this approach, for which Freedman presents a remarkably persuasive case, one can imagine more and less popular versions of his vision depending on how the power of central government is broken up and what comes to vary between regions, as he admits will inevitably happen.
Much of this book is focused on the strangely undemocratic consequences of the evolution undergone by the British constitution since the 1970s, and yet Freedman’s book has its own democratic blind spots. Indeed, for a work so focused on the decline of local and national democracy, Failed State is one whose vision of politics has very little room or time for expressions of popular power. As Freedman makes clear in the final pages of the book, his is a preliminary sketch for potential reforms by a visionary Prime Minister, pulling levers from above, and not for any sort of mass political movement. To stop the rise of Cummingsism, Freedman’s book implies, the benign super-genius might be needed after all, if not to pilot the ship of state permanently, then at least to take it back to the harbour for refitting.
I do not mean by this to impugn Sam Freedman’s argument, and I do not think this issue stems from an anti-democratic mindset. What I do mean instead to suggest, however, is that Freedman, like so many other political thinkers before him, prefers, whether consciously or not, to remain in the lofty realm of institutions and statesmen precisely because tackling the underlying problem of a decaying national political culture seems beyond the reach of our political designs.
Politicians have not, after all, simply changed their behaviour in a fit of pique. Many of the political dynamics which Freedman condemns are often popular with voters, at least in the short term. It is we voters, after all, who seemingly want the state to interfere in everything, who click on the articles and like or post the scornful tweets which drive politicians into a frenzy of non-action, and who prefer to seek solutions via a deluge of letters to our MPs than bother with the complex business of interacting with local government.
Yet short, as the old Brechtian proverb runs, of dissolving the people and electing a new one, it is not clear what, if anything, can be done by the government in a democracy to mitigate these kinds of problems. Beneficial as it no doubt would be, solving our failed state might require bigger changes than local government reform.
Angus Brown.
Angus Brown is a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on the history of constitutional thought.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.