Failed State

Having read – and reviewed - a whole spate of books critical of the state of UK governance in recent years, for August I went back to my dog-eared copy of Sam Freedman’s ‘FAILED STATE’  from January 2025 - to see if the latest, (Burnham) plan to fix some very well-known problems stood a better chance of success. For comparison, one should consider Caroline Slocock’s ‘Bad Government’, Vicky Price’s ‘Mismanaged Decline’, Torsten Bell’s ‘Great Britain?’ James O’Brien’s ‘How they Broke Britain’ and Will Hutton’s 2024 ‘This time no mistakes’. How he must regret that title!      I reviewed them all - Read my comments  here

Freedman covers it all. The familiar themes of over-centralisation from an inadequately-staffed 10 Downing St, the hollowing-out of institutional expertise by subcontracting policy-making to think tanks and operations to greedy, incompetent sub-contractors. Like others it’s critical of Treasury interference, the neglect of local government and the short-termist culture of government by announcement!  Also like the others, he sounded hopeful that Keir Starmer’s huge majority would enable progress towards addressing some of these issues. Now, re-reading his analysis, one can see that piecemeal petty tinkering around the edges would never do much, and one reads the Cabinet Statement on Rewiring the State with at least a little optimism that someone has taken the Freedman (and others’) critique seriously.

For the whole challenge is greater than the aggregate of these individual and long-standing deficiencies, and this book remains a pretty good account of what’s wrong across the board. Let’s see if it’s still as relevant by the time Andy Burnham finishes his Premiership!