Does the argument of a ‘Failed State’ stack up? Review of Sam Freedman’s new book

A 25-year journey

It is decades since I last read quite so many words by Sam Freedman. But over 25 years ago, I had the privilege of being his GCSE History teacher. In recent years, Sam has made his name as a political commentator and he has now written his first book, Failed State: Why nothing works and how to fix it.

Teaching teenage Sam was a tricky job because of his curious mind (and also because I was the youngest teacher at his expensive and prestigious London boys’ school). Moreover, Sam’s father, Lawrence Freedman, was a War Studies Professor at King’s College London and the country’s greatest expert on some of the areas I was teaching his son about, making parents’ evenings interesting affairs!

In truth, as one former Number 10 apparatchik put it to me, ‘I bet Sam didn’t need much teaching’. As a voracious reader and lover of history and with a close-knit group of bright friends (one of whom is acknowledged in the new book as the person who taught him to write), Sam always looked destined for success on his own terms. And he has unequivocally achieved that here.

The book is beautifully written and meticulously researched, displaying Sam’s huge capacity for information – even if it is in parts a little black-and-white in its verdicts (as when we are told ‘no one is really making policy at all’ inside Whitehall). Moreover, Sam has made judicious use of his extensive contacts book for interviews. These provide many juicy original comments (and I would like to pretend this is down to all the time we spent distinguishing primary from secondary sources back in the 1990s…).

When I first knew Sam, it was in the heady early New Labour days when the Conservative Party was in the doldrums and Britpop was in the ascendancy. It was a macho time of Loaded magazine and Number 10 spinmasters (invariably men) trampling on open discussion. We know today how badly that all ended, which Sam duly notes towards the end of his book. Yet Sam also argues persuasively that the Blairite Delivery Unit and Strategy Unit were rare successful attempts at getting Number 10, with its ancient architecture completely unsuited to modern government, to operate more effectively. The Brownite Treasury, with its penchant for off-balance sheet (but ruinously expensive) PFI initiatives, comes out less well.

After Oxford, Sam seemed to have absorbed the traditional right-wing views typical of someone with his educational background. Although I struggled to find any mention of it on his LinkedIn profile, Sam’s career began as a lobbyist for elite education: in the words of the Evening Standard, Sam ‘Made his name as an in-house boffin for the private schools’ umbrella group, the Independent Schools Council.’ Afterwards, he was employed by the Cameroon think-tank Policy Exchange and, once the Coalition took office, Sam entered Michael Gove’s Department for Education as a Policy Adviser. There, he worked on free schools, academies and the like – as well as helping with the Education Act (2011), which was the legislative vehicle that introduced a real interest rate on student loans and extended the loan system to part-time students.

Sam has been on quite the journey since. His recent Substack pieces include ‘A response to every argument against VAT on private school fees’ (£), ‘What I got wrong about tuition fees’ (£) and ‘How to change your mind’ (£). In his book, Sam restricts the snippiest barbs to his former colleagues on the right. We are told Steve Hilton is guilty of ‘the sort of amorphous and ill-thought-through idea you’d expect from someone who’s ended up as a talking head on Fox News.’ Suella Braverman ‘achieved less than nothing’. Chris Grayling ‘is high up on the list of the least competent people to be given high office in British history.’

So Sam is best thought of today as part of that coterie of commentators, including Tim Montgomerie and Dan Hodges, who remain closely associated with one side of the political spectrum or the other as a result of their early careers but who are now endlessly critical of that same outlook. It is a sure formula for becoming a high-profile commentator – Montgomerie, Hodges and Sam each have over 150,000 followers on Twitter / X.

The path to success

Sam’s book is strongest where it punctures any remaining idea that the relationship between central government and local government is healthy. It tracks the gradual growth in central control, the reduction in local decision-making powers and the increase in competitive bidding for small pots of ringfenced Whitehall money. Sam’s core argument, that England has lacked sufficiently powerful entities sitting between the national and the local is not, as he himself readily admits, especially original but it is nonetheless persuasive.

As I read Sam’s compelling account of the battle for dominance by Whitehall Departments over town halls, I thought back to the warm words expressed about Sir Bob Kerslake, former Chair of Sheffield Hallam University, at the recent UPP Foundation event held in his memory. The speakers there pointed out how rare Bob was in having served successfully at a top level in both local and national administration, given the different challenges involved and the problems in jumping ship from one to the other. Perhaps the two levels of administration deserve more comparable levels of power, spending and prestige, just as Sam argues?

In my view, Sam’s book is weakest, however, when searching for ways to strengthen Parliament’s scrutiny over central government. After a hard-hitting and compelling chapter on the growing power of government (the executive) relative to the Houses of Parliament (the legislature), Sam shies away from any major reform to the House of Lords; ‘radical reform’, we are bluntly told, is ‘not needed.’ Less tribal and non-elected peers seem to be exactly the sort of people Sam wants to govern us, in preference to those who sully themselves with the electorate’s latest priorities.

To my mind, Sam also overemphasises the current influence of Select Committees, claiming without listing any specific evidence that their policy recommendations are often ‘adopted by departments’ in Whitehall. This apparent exaggeration leads Sam to think ‘only a few changes’ to the make up of Select Committees would shake things up. Yet an unreformed House of Lords and a pay increase for Select Committee chairs feel like damp squibs after the sucker punch of the preceding pages on Parliament’s failures.

In the book, lawyers – like peers – are given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their recent battles with elected politicians. And as with fixing the perceived problems between the executive and the legislature, Sam sees the Select Committee system as the solution to resolving heightened tension between the executive and the judiciary. He recommends judges should come under ‘select committee oversight’. Given the make up of the new Parliament, in which one party has around two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons (on one-third of the votes) and therefore immense sway inside the new Select Committees too, this feels like an insecure safeguard against politicisation of the legal system.

Autonomy versus micromanagement

While the Office for Students and UKRI receive the odd mention, the links to higher education in Sam’s book are infrequent and generally indirect, as outlined below. Indeed, overall it is not a book about UK higher education in any meaningful sense at all: the book is about the state, not independent institutions some of which pre-date the modern state. I have chosen to review it here not because I once taught Sam – I taught two people who went on to be pop stars and have never felt tempted to review their music here – nor because he is a regular commentator on educational issues. I have chosen to review the book because it may inadvertently tell us something rather important about UK higher education institutions.

The story Sam tells is of an overpowerful centre prone to micromanagement, in part because local government has been so weakened. For example, when it comes to schooling, Sam explains how the system was sub-optimal when it was mainly run by local authorities but remained sub-optimal in different ways when academies, overseen by the Department for Education, became dominant. One Whitehall Department cannot have close oversight of every school.

In contrast, universities, most of which are legally charities, remained (largely) autonomous while first local government and then central government took over responsibility for schools. In fact, taking the long view, the process was in the opposite direction: those public institutions of higher education that did exist, like local polytechnics, were gradually given their freedoms and became universities while the growing fee / loan system then protected and strengthened their institutional autonomy. The end result was the creation of a world-class higher education system, with international league tables suggesting UK universities beat the less autonomous universities in other European countries hands down.

Yet the level of autonomy that has produced this success is currently under threat on more than one front, including from the Office for National Statistics’s review of whether universities should be classified as part of the public sector, from the growing powers of the Office for Students and from the Labour Party’s winning manifesto commitment to do more to integrate further and higher education, not to mention from the refusal of both Conservative and Labour Ministers to raise the fee / loan income directed at both institutions and students in line with inflation. In some ways, higher education risks becoming yet another case study of how the centre of government is tempted to think it can do it all.

So in the end, I struggle to reconcile Sam’s repudiation elsewhere of England’s student funding model plus his support for ‘place planning’ (ie student number controls) with the general support in his book for central government butting out of stuff. When it comes to higher education, it is the funding model we have that has the most potential to protect institutional autonomy while also ensuring higher education is ever more open by, for example, allowing the absence of number caps.

Perhaps this all goes to show how tremendously hard it is to avoid the trap of wanting government action at a micro level while simultaneously repudiating the overweening centralisation of power that has taken place over recent decades.

Nonetheless, overall Keir Starmer could do much worse than read this book as he wrestles with such dilemmas while on his summer hols.

Perhaps it is the inevitable consequence of any really big change in political direction, but we are currently spoilt for choice on good books about the state of the country and how to fix it. I’ve reviewed Paul Johnson’s book here and there is another by the new MP for Swansea West Torsten Bell.