The 2024 U.S. election was to a large extent driven by voter frustrations with what seems to many to be a sluggish economy and dysfunctional government that no longer delivers for its citizens as it used to. But similar frustrations are felt in developed countries all around the world, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than in Great Britain. Its economy has stagnated for fifteen years, with the lowest rates of productivity registered over such a span since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Child poverty levels have risen to record levels, prisons are dangerously overcrowded, sewage spills increasingly pollute the country’s lakes and rivers, rail service is increasingly chaotic, and dissatisfaction with almost all public services is rife. Even Rishi Sunak, the former Conservative prime minister, complained while in office that “Politics doesn’t work the way it should. … [O]ur political system is too focused on short-term advantage, not long-term success. Politicians spend more time campaigning for change than actually delivering it.”

Sam Freedman, who writes the UK’s leading politics Substack with his father Lawrence, has a new book with the blunt title Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It. Unusually for books of this type, his analysis spends little time on individual politicians or ideologies and looks at the underlying systemic factors responsible for Britain’s crisis. He draws inspiration from W. Edward Deming’s famous observation that “A bad system will beat a good person every time” and points to key critical changes over the past half-century that have made it nearly impossible even for competent, governing-minded prime ministers to do their jobs effectively.

A critical factor in this governance crisis has been the UK’s drive toward excessive centralization, which has led the government to attempt to do too much while working through institutions that lack the capacity to handle increasingly complex problems. In an attempt to compensate for this lack of capacity, the government increasingly has relied upon outsourcing what once were public services to a handful of powerful private companies, which continue to reap massive public contracts despite scandalous failures. Worse still, these developments have taken place against a backdrop of an accelerating media cycle. Decisions have to be taken faster and under greater pressure, which gives politicians destructive incentives and increasingly leads them to make disastrous decisions, which they then attempt to excuse away through public-relations spin.

In this podcast episode, Sam Freedman discusses how Britain’s combination of hypercentralization, executive dominance of an overly large and complex state, and a superfast media cycle have combined to produce toxic politics and something like national paralysis. He concludes that this governance crisis will end as other crises have before it: “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.”

#92: Merel Vercammen, violist