Failed State: Inside Britain's Governance Crisis | Sam Freedman

In Episode 433 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/failed-state-britains-governance-crisis-sam-freedman of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Sam Freedman, a former senior policy advisor in the UK's Department for Education, political analyst, and the author of "Failed State," a timely exploration of the deep-rooted dysfunction within British governance and how to fix it. In their conversation, Sam Freedman examines the origins and nature of the current crisis, focusing on issues such as extreme centralization, the dominance of executive power, and the corrosive impact of modern media dynamics on politics and policymaking. He also takes listeners through several critical turning points in recent British political history, explaining how the solutions to past crises have, paradoxically, laid the groundwork for today's dysfunction. The episode ends with an exploration of Sam's proposed radical institutional reforms, why incremental solutions are insufficient, and how these issues compare to those facing the United States and other western democracies. The two discuss decentralization, the strengthening of parliamentary scrutiny, civil service reform, and the complex interplay between governance, media influence, and public trust in political institutions. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 07/31/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Sam Friedman, a former senior policy advisor in the UK's Department for Education, a political analyst, and the author of Failed State: A Timely Exploration of the Deep-Routed Dysfunction Within British Governance and How to Fix It. Sam and I examine the origins and nature of the current crisis that he identifies,

• 0:41Demetri Kofinas?

  focusing on issues such as extreme centralization, the dominance of executive power, and the corrosive impact of modern media dynamics on politics and policymaking. He also takes us through several critical turning points in recent British political history, explaining how the solutions to past crises have paradoxically laid the groundwork for today's dysfunction. The episode ends with an exploration of Sam's proposed radical institutional reforms, why incremental solutions are insufficient, and how these issues compare to those facing the United States and other Western democracies. We discuss decentralization, the strengthening of parliamentary scrutiny, civil service reform, and the complex interplay between governance, media influence, and public trust

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  in political institutions. If you want access to the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our Super Nerd tier at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  And with that, please enjoy this highly enlightening and unique conversation with my guest, Sam Friedman.

• 2:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Sam Friedman, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Great, lovely to be here.

• 2:26Demetri Kofinas?

  So Sam, I'm very excited to have you on the podcast. Your book was recommended to me by one of our genius members who read it. And I didn't know what I would find in it. And I didn't know the extent to which it was going to be focused on the UK or not. But so many of the lessons from failed state, I think, apply also to what we're experiencing in the US as well as other countries, because one of the sources of the diagnosis that you make has to do with the decline in institutional trust, among other things that, again, parallel what we're experiencing here in the US and in other countries in Europe and other developed countries. Before we get into the book, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. So what's your background and what led you to write a book like this?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. So my background is in policy. I worked in education policy for a long time and I ended up working at our Department for Education in the UK as an advisor to our Secretary of State about 15 years ago. And then that led into a general interest in policy and politics. And later on in my career, I decided I wanted to be a full time writer in 2021. So I quit my job at the time and decided I wanted to write this book. And then it was really triggered by the events of 2022 in the UK. We had the government of Boris Johnson fell apart and then we had Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for about a month and a half, and that fell apart.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And you could sense then that a Labour government was going to come in at the next election, which it did. And I wanted to write a book almost as a warning to that incoming government to say, don't think that all of our problems are because Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have messed up. They're much deeper, they're much longer lasting and they're much more systemic. So if you just come in thinking we're decent people, we're not like them, so we'll be able to do a good job, you're going to get a big shock, which I think they have got. So that was really the instinct behind wanting to write the book. It was basically almost a letter to the new government coming in.

• 4:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I'm curious to understand how that, whether that message has been received or not. But before we even, we get into that part of the conversation, I want to at least give listeners a sense of what the book is about, like the larger narrative arc. So it's, I would describe it largely as a commentary about the deep dysfunction within British governance, as well as what I think you think can be done or should be done to try and. Fix the problem. For those who don't really understand what's going on in British politics and in the British economy, what is the story that you would tell and how far back would you have to go in order to tell it?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Sure. So I go back mostly to around forty, forty-five years ago to the arrival of the Thatcher government. And I put this within a sort of theory, I guess, of cycles, which is a common theory in political science. I'm not a declinist. I don't believe that our country is getting worse and worse, cannot be fixed. The argument I make is that Britain, and in fact, every country, goes through a series of cycles of crisis, if you like, and the resolution to one crisis ultimately creates the next. So Thatcher is sort of known for, in some ways, resolving the crisis that came before, the economic crisis of the 1970s in the UK. But a number of the things she did, and then successive governments have done after that, I argue, go to those sort of deep root causes of the dysfunction

• 5:40Speaker 01

  of the British state today. So the ones I pull out are a centralization, the UK, well, particularly England is the most centralized, rich country in the world. All of the decisions are made by central government. And that, I think, has led to central government being overwhelmed and unable to make decisions effectively. I look at executive power and the way that, again, the UK is unusual in having such a concentration of executive power within its kind of constitutional settlement, and how that's got worse over the last forty years, making it harder to scrutinize what government is doing and easier to pass bad laws, essentially. And then I look at the way the media has affected politics, which is something that's happened, not just in the UK, of course, but all over the world,

• 6:24Speaker 01

  and how the speeding up of the media cycle and the sensationalization of the media cycle has made it much harder to do policy effectively. So those are my sort of three big arguments, and they're all over sort of thirty, forty years that they've taken place.

• 6:39Demetri Kofinas?

  So in the book's introduction, you seem to suggest that Britain has experienced these cyclical recurring crises throughout its history, but that, to quote Robin Butler, who was the private secretary of Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1974 during another one of these major crises in British politics, "Every crisis is a crisis in a different way." What do you think is important for people to understand about the nature of political crises in general, like those that have recurred in British politics over and over again? And why do you believe that we are at the end of one now?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  One of the common features of crises is that people try and ignore them. They're based on a sort of consensus view of the world, and it's easier for everyone to pretend that they're not happening until it gets to the point where you can't pretend they're not happening anymore. And that's when it sort of emerges as a crisis moment, and you have to do the thing that you probably should have done before in order to resolve it. So you can go back to this early part of the 20th century, and we had a crisis of democracy, where the House of Lords was still as powerful as our House of Commons, and ended up being a big crisis around that. You had a crisis of welfare when, before our modern welfare system was built after the Second World War.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  You had an economic crisis in the 1970s, which was a global crisis, but it was particularly bad in the UK, built off a sort of model of economic thinking that had been prevalent since the Second World War. No party wanted to accept it was the wrong model until it became unviable, and then a party, the Conservative Party, did accept it was the wrong model. So it's this nature of crises just getting worse and worse and worse, no one wanting to acknowledge it until the point where you have to. It gets so bad, and then you fix it, and then you move into the next sort of cycle. And I argue that the cycle we're in at the moment is a crisis of governance rather than of economics or democracy. There are a lot of things that are right with Britain and a lot of things that are fundamentally good and that we could build on, but the are creaking systems of governance

• 8:38Speaker 01

  are what are letting us down now.

• 8:39Demetri Kofinas?

  So the question that naturally follows there is what differentiates this crisis from the previous ones of democracy, social conflict, or economic upheaval that you've written about? But right before that question, I'm curious, when did this problem become clear to you?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  To a degree, it became clear when I was working in government myself. There were a lot of frustrations around working in government that you could see were related to these problems. And I talk about in the book. I worked with a minister, Michael Gove, who was particularly energetic and dynamic and determined to get stuff done and was quite unusual in his willingness to cut through a lot of this stuff. And I also worked with a man called Dominic Cummings, who ended up becoming quite famous as an adviser to Boris Johnson when he became Prime Minister, who also was keen to cut through thickets of regulation and so on. But I could see there was some truth to their frustrations. But then after that, I continued to work around Westminster, work in politics, and

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I could just see how these common factors kept coming around. At every scandal, every problem that emerged, you could see had these sort of same origins within it.

• 9:49Demetri Kofinas?

  So you mentioned that this time the problem is one of governance. What differentiates this crisis from previous ones, like, for example, the one that overtook Britain in the 1970s?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  One important difference is it's much less visible what the core problem is. In the 70s, it was really clear that the problem was very high levels of inflation that were being driven in part by global conditions, but in part by wage demands from very powerful trade unions. So there was, whilst people might have disagreed on what to do about the issue of inflation, it was really visible what it was. Governance is harder to see for your average voter. It's pretty hidden, a lot of these problems. If you started talking about centralisation or executive power to your average focus group, they'd be really quite confused as to what you were talking about. Their issue is they can't get a GP appointment, or their train isn't arriving on time, or they don't necessarily connect those things to these deep-seated problems of governance.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  So I think that's a really important difference and in many ways makes it harder to deal with because if you're a politician, it seems self-involved and navel-gazing to fixate on how the structures of government works. People want you to do things that are visible to them, but actually, it's that wiring that needs to be fixed.

• 11:04Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's dig into centralisation a bit more, and I'd love, as we move along in this conversation, to try and draw parallels where they may or may not exist with the United States and the dysfunction that we have here. So let's just talk a bit about centralisation. First of all, what do you mean when you say that centralisation is a core weakness of the British state?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  So, England is incredibly centralized. And here I am talking about England, not the United Kingdom, because obviously we have four different countries within the United Kingdom, and there is a lot of devolution to those separate countries. But for England, which is by far the biggest part of the United Kingdom, it's incredibly centralized.

• 11:38Demetri Kofinas?

  What percentage of the United Kingdom does England represent, both from a population and from a GDP perspective?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  About eighty-five to ninety percent.

• 11:47Demetri Kofinas?

  Got it.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So it's by far the biggest component. And if you compare it with with America, which is pretty decentralized, federalized state, you know, a lot of taxes in America are raised at the state level, the local level. A lot of decisions about things like education, healthcare, welfare are taken at that level as well. Here, the tax take is almost entirely centralized. Local government does exist, but it has very little control over the amount of revenue it has and what it's allowed to spend it on. And decisions about whether it's the school curriculum, or how the health system works are all taken centrally within Westminster by by the national government. And that means that if you're

• 12:30Speaker 01

  a minister in control of one of those things, you are simply just overwhelmed by the complexity of the modern world, because you have to be involved in decisions about every single aspect, from the very small to the very big and strategic. It sort of sucks governments down into the weeds and prevents them from focusing on what really matters.

• 12:47Demetri Kofinas?

  So, I mean, I think this is an interesting one to compare with the US, because you're right, the US has always been more confederal, or more decentralized. Though there have been ways in which the governance has become more centralized, but I think that's more in terms of the growth of power in the executive branch. Would you agree with that?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think one of the points actually I make in the introduction is is around What it would be like in America if it was as centralized as England. Now, you obviously have the Trump government that is trying to boost executive power very considerably. And if it had control over everything and the way the central government in England has has control over everything, it would be able to do an awful lot more damage than it's already doing. And actually, the states having their own power bases and particularly democratic states provides quite an important bulwark against some of the dysfunction in the US. So there, of course, there's plenty it doesn't stop.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And one of my worries about centralization is if we were to get a highly dysfunctional government, we've we've had some pretty bad ones, but one that was as I I would describe as malevolent as the Trump government in England and the UK. They would be able to do a lot more damage than Trump is doing because they would control every lever of power. And local government is pretty toothless here.

• 14:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So I have one more question about decentralization as it relates to the United States. But before I ask that, I have another question I want to ask you about complexity in the UK. So the centralization in the UK and how complexity might exacerbate the challenges of governance. How does increased complexity and the way that governance happens today exacerbate the consequences of centralization? Does it make it ever more difficult to actually govern?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So let me give you an example. When I was working at the Department for Education, we continued a process that had been happening under the previous government of centralizing a large part of the school system. So the majority of schools now in England, and there are twenty odd thousand schools in England, the majority of them now report directly to the Department for Education in Westminster. They do not report to local government. That's obviously hugely different from the states. And that means that the Secretary of State in the UK is making decisions about individual schools. If an individual school wants to sell off a bit of their playing fields, they have to get permission from the Secretary of State. And so the Department for Education is consumed with these kind of decisions about

• 15:23Speaker 01

  very small aspects of our school system that in every other country in the world that I can think of, any other big country certainly, would be being made at a local or state government level. And that means when you're sort of looking at big strategic questions about what the school system should be doing or where it should be going, they have less time to think about that because they're so enmeshed in this kind of minor stuff. And another sort of silly example, but one I use in the book from the last government here that was led by Rishi Sunak, he spent an inordinate amount of time developing a chess strategy from Number Ten, which involved in the end buying chess tables for parks in local parks around the country and councils bidding so they could get a bit of money to build a chess table in a park.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And it's just sort of mad that central government would be going anywhere near something like that, especially the Prime Minister, but any part of central government shouldn't be thinking about the decor of local parks. And it's that level of minutiae then takes away from your ability to be strategic. It also means another sort of part of this complexity is, is the way in which the regulatory state, which is something that's built up in every developed country and is built up in the US as well, is also sort of completely centralized in the UK. And it means that ministers, because there aren't very many ministers responsible for any particular department, there's three, four, five of them in any department, just cannot get control of this regulatory state because it's so big and so centralized and

• 16:52Speaker 01

  there's no way one individual, however smart they are, can understand all of this machinery that sits underneath them. So it's that complexity that makes governing so difficult.

• 17:02Demetri Kofinas?

  Have you ever looked into the governance model in China and tried to compare it to other communist governance models, most notably the USSR? And the reason I ask that is because, again, I'm no expert on this subject at all, but just from the various conversations I've had on this show and episodes I've done on China, it seems that they've done a good job of reducing, in certain areas, I mean, it's still a very centralized government, obviously, the Communist Party that is, but the government itself is much more decentralized than the USSR governance model was. And I'm just curious if you've looked into that and how you would apply your insights to, or use your insights to help us understand what the, maybe the Chinese have done better in their, in their implementation of a centralized government structure.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean absolutely, I'm no China expert, but you're right that although people think of China as being this incredibly centralized state, and in some respects it is, they actually have devolved a huge amount of autonomy and power to their local provinces. And they do that by essentially having this incredible party discipline across the whole superstructure of the state that allows them to feel confident in devolving that level of power downwards. And they also do it by having incredibly strong accountability for the people running those provinces who know that if they do not do a bad job, or are seen as doing a bad job, they're going to get into a lot of trouble. But their ability to do that is in part because obviously they don't have a democracy and they're not operating in a system where

• 18:31Speaker 01

  there's political rivalry. One of the reasons why a lot of democratic states have shifted towards centralization, and the UK certainly has, is because oftentimes, local government is held by your political opponent. So one of the reasons why Thatcher in the 1980s did so much to destroy local government was that at the time when local government was more powerful, a lot of it was controlled by very left-wing Labour councils, who she saw and described as the enemy within, and so she wanted to remove their power base. That, of course, isn't a problem for the Chinese government because there aren't, there's only one party.

• 19:09Demetri Kofinas?

  So it's tough whenever you're trying to make comparisons across different political systems, and this is also true for the US and the UK, not only because of your comments about centralization and decentralization, but also the UK runs a parliamentary democracy and we have a constitutional republic here. So we have divided government, whereas in the UK you have unified government. Every time you have a new government, the prime minister also controls the parliament. So I'm curious, like, we have so much political gridlock here in the United States and so much polarization. I'm curious how that compares to the UK, and to the extent that there are differences, how much of that reflects the different governance models and how much of it reflects the differences in centralization versus decentralization?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I think to my understanding of what's happening in the US, it's mostly to do with the structure of of that kind of separation of powers. And as you say, you have a very extreme separation of powers and we don't have any separation of powers. So we're at the opposite ends of the spectrum on that model, partly because the US constitution was written to contrast with what was seen as the constitutional settlement in the UK and had led to the War of Independence. So, I mean, one of the interesting things about what Trump is doing is he's essentially trying to erase a lot of that separation of power, helped by the fact the Republicans control both the House and the Senate and, in effect, the Supreme Court, though not quite so simply.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And by exerting enormous threat level to fellow Republicans in the House and the Senate, he's been able to sort of force through a lot of his agenda in a way that previous presidents have found that they're very gridlocked. So in a way, he's trying to overpower that separation. But in, again, if you look at the UK model, if he was here in the UK, a lot of the things that people are describing as being unconstitutional wouldn't be unconstitutional. They would be absolutely fine here. He could do what he liked. He could, if he was Prime Minister here and he had a majority in the House of Commons, he could override the courts, he could override anybody, because we don't have those separation of powers at all. And that's, you know, as I say, we're extremes of this spectrum, but I would argue that

• 21:22Speaker 01

  the UK extreme is is more dangerous in some ways than the US extreme.

• 21:27Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, this is one of the most interesting topics you explore in the book, from my perspective at least, because I'm quite familiar with the growth of executive power in the United States. I mean, executive power has grown enormously since FDR's administration and the end of World War II, but since 9/11 and the War on Terror, we've seen presidents rule increasingly by executive order. And in fact, many members of Bush's cabinet in the early 2000s were very explicit about their desire to strengthen what they called the unitary executive after what they felt had been an unintentional attenuation of its powers in the year since Nixon's resignation in 1974. So it was surprising for me to read in your book that Britain has one of the

• 22:12Demetri Kofinas?

  most dominant executive branches of any Western democracy. How powerful is Britain's executive branch? And where does that power reside? And what are some concrete examples you can provide to us to help us understand how materially relevant that power is in practice?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yes, so there's effectively no constitutional check on the power of Parliament. And Parliament is controlled by whichever party has a majority in the House of Commons, and they're the people who appoint the Prime Minister. So the Prime Minister, as long as he has that majority, he or she has that majority. And as long as he or she has the support of his party in the House of Commons, can do pretty much whatever they like. The House of Lords is a revising chamber. It has no real power to stop the House of Commons doing anything. So it will step back if the House of Commons wants to do anything. The King, in theory, still signs off legislation, but would never interfere with the process of legislation.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So he doesn't represent any kind of check on power. We have courts, we have independent judiciary, but we have a called parliamentary sovereignty, which means that ultimately if Parliament passed a law saying something, that's what goes. They can override the courts by passing a law. So there's no part of our system that can stop the executive doing anything it wants as long as it controls Parliament. And that's obviously very, very different from the theoretical model, at least in the US, and indeed, most other countries where there are, there is some level of constitutional separation of powers. And the way it's kind of worked in the, in the UK, it's sort of worked up to this point because people have respected convention that they don't do certain things and don't behave in certain ways. But it's all convention.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  There's no legal or constitutional structure that would prevent a Trump-like figure in the UK doing pretty much whatever they wanted. And to take some lesser examples, because we haven't yet had a Trump-like Prime Minister in the UK. But if we look at the financial crisis, just to give an example, in the US, there was this huge Negotiation between President Bush, as it was at the time, and his team and Congress. And initially, Congress would refuse to pass the bank bailout, the TARP Act, and then they did. Eventually, after a huge amount of pressure, and there was this huge battle between different branches of government. In the UK, they just did it. The Prime Minister just said, we're doing this, we just did it. And there was no need to sort of clear it with anybody at all.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  During Covid, we passed an act within a couple of days to that allowed for widespread lockdowns at a national level and so on with very little debate. So there is this extraordinary power within the executive when they want to use it.

• 24:56Demetri Kofinas?

  So in theory, because you guys don't have a constitution, the Parliament could pass a law that says, you know, everyone under the age of eighteen will need to be herded into cages. And there's just no way around that. There's no, there's no legal buffer to protect people's fundamental rights in any sort of form or fashion. Is that, is that an accurate description?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  So in theory, if you believe in the pure vision of parliamentary sovereignty, which many people do, then yes, they could do that. I would argue that if that did happen, we would get a constitutional crisis of a very messy kind, because we don't have a written constitution. And you would get the court saying, you can't do that. And it, it's such a fundamental attack on human rights that we aren't going to allow that. But then you would have an impasse, because there's nowhere written down anywhere who gets to win that argument between Parliament and the courts. If the courts say, wait a minute, this shouldn't apply, it's all convention. So we've never reached that point. We didn't have anything quite like that, but we did have a situation under the last government where we had a big battle over a proposal to deport immigrants to Rwanda.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And the Supreme Court, our Supreme Court, said Rwanda is not a safe country to deport people to, so we're not going to allow you to do that. And then Parliament passed a law saying Rwanda is a safe country. Just defining Rwanda as a safe country. And had the government stayed in power and won the election and forced that through, it would have been very interesting to see whether the Supreme Court had just accepted that and said, okay, we're subservient to Parliament, you win, Rwanda's a safe country, or whether they would have tried to fight back. So we've come quite close, I think, to the edges of this constitutional impasse, but we haven't hit it yet.

• 26:38Demetri Kofinas?

  So is it fair to say that you think the American constitutional system with its strong judicial review by the Supreme Court is a more effective check on executive power compared to what we have in the UK and preferable?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  So every system, I would argue, has its merits and flaws. I think if you look at the US system, one of the advantages of the UK, of the US is we do have an independent judiciary, they're not appointed by politicians. One of the challenges, obviously, of the Supreme Court is they are political appointments. And so you get this situation where previous eras, it's been dominated by liberal judges. At the moment, it's dominated by conservative judges, which somewhat undermines that separation of powers. But I do think having a written separation and having a constitution has a lot of value. And I think you can see that even with the way Trump is behaving. And even though he's got a Supreme Court and a Congress who are fairly compliant, he's still being stopped from doing some of the

• 27:33Speaker 01

  things he wants to do because of those separation of powers. And that would be much harder to guarantee here.

• 27:39Demetri Kofinas?

  It's very interesting listening to you tell me about all the ways in which Trump is being stopped from acting because in my experience, and this is not just with Trump, obviously, it's a result of the growth in executive power that I've experienced that we talked about over the course of my lifetime. The president has just become more and more powerful. And what the president wants, the president will often get, so long as it doesn't require legislation. And so much today, as we've already established, is done through executive order for exactly this reason. But again, I think this is, you know, something I found really valuable about reading the book, which is that it helped me draw comparisons across political systems. And it really helps me appreciate so much more how many checks

• 28:23Demetri Kofinas?

  and balances we actually do have in this country. So when it comes to actually holding the executive accountable in the United Kingdom, what are some concrete examples that you can provide us with that show how Parliament's role in that process has weakened substantially?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  So one of the reasons it's been weakened is because the way in which debates happen in the House of Commons has been fairly dramatically changed. It was at the beginning of this century. So when you introduce a piece of legislation into the House of Commons, you introduce a timetable, which sounds very arcane and boring, but it's really important. Because you can set that timetable to be whatever you like it to be. As long as you have the majority and the majority will vote for it. So you can have an incredibly contentious, complicated piece of legislation. And you can say, we're going to spend a day debating it, four hours debating it. And then when that four hours is up, that's it, debate over and you have a vote. And if the government has a majority, they win the vote.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  So you have this process where there's just very little scrutiny of sometimes incredibly detailed and complex legislation. It doesn't happen every time, there can be a lot of scrutiny. But if a government doesn't want it, they can just root around and avoid that, which is then very dangerous because you've had lots of examples of very poor, poorly written legislation just being shoved through without debate or discussion. And then often ends up in the courts because it was so poorly drafted. But sometimes you don't even need legislation to do something. We have something called secondary legislation whereby awful lot of stuff that happens, that government does, can be done using existing bills. And you just tweak something within them without any debate at all.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  So our net zero target, for instance, which is a very politically contentious topic, where we're supposed to be reaching net zero by 2050, was passed by the last government with no, with I think an hours debate and no vote, because they use secondary legislation to do it. A lot of COVID laws use secondary legislation as well with no debate, no discussion. So this big increase in the use of these essentially tricks to get around having any debate in Parliament. And a very weak House of Commons has contributed to bad laws.

• 30:38Demetri Kofinas?

  So we already spoke about the two of the three sources of the UK's governance crisis. The over-centralization is something that is more unique to Britain, or in particular case of England, that you highlighted. The growth in executive power is something we've seen in the US as well, though it sounds like Britain, the situation in Britain is much more severe. The third one, which you highlighted, having to do with the modern media cycle and the short-termism that derives from it, is one that I found really resonant. I mean, it really resonates with me in terms of what we're seeing to the US. And you show how it's fundamentally reshaped politics by emphasizing short-term announcements over substantive policymaking.

• 31:23Demetri Kofinas?

  What are the changes in media that have driven ever shorter news cycles, in your opinion? And how does it play out inside the governing power structure in Britain?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  So there's been a series of changes in the way that media works, all the way back from the Second World War onwards, that have incrementally sped up this media cycle. So if you look at coverage after the Second World War, it's incredibly deferential. There's a lot of gatekeeping. You have a small number of very powerful newspapers who have relationships with the government. You have, at that point, one broadcaster who are incredibly deferential to the government. And over the next sort of 20 years, into the 70s, into the 80s, you start to get a bit less deference, a bit more focus on actually trying to poke and prod at governments, more difficult interviewers coming onto the scene, more of a focus from newspapers on the personalities

• 32:16Speaker 01

  involved in politics, the prime minister themselves, scandal, less on policy and what goes on in parliament. But the really big moment is the introduction of a 24-hour news, which happened in the UK, happened initially in 1989, and then the BBC introduced their channel a few years after that. And that started this sort of process where there was constant news coverage. So you move from having a situation in which you could really control the news cycle as a politician, because you just had to have a key number of relationships. Relationships with the people who edited the newspapers and a couple of broadcast channels who had their one or two news programs every night. You could manage that news cycle fairly comfortably.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And it moved, when you got 24 hour news, it moved to being a sort of constant cycle where things could break immediately and you had less time and less space to think about what was happening. Then you had the internet arriving and that sped it up even more. Stories could break straight away and people who weren't the official news media could suddenly appear and make your life difficult bloggers and so on. And then you had social media, which sped it up even more and the government under even more of a spotlight and made it even harder to spend any time thinking about something before you had to respond. And this sort of ratcheting up of the speed of the media cycle has focused Westminster's attention more and more and government's attention more and more on managing the media

• 33:39Speaker 01

  because it's got so much harder to do and less on actually governing, which is what they should be doing.

• 33:45Demetri Kofinas?

  So this is not a question that I had formerly before we sat down, but so I'm going to do my best to kind of articulate it. There was a book I read many years ago and I had the author on. His name was Mark C. Taylor and the book was called Speed Limits. And I think one of the central insights of the book was that our world was starting to move faster and faster. And the faster it moved, the less in accordance our lives were with sort of nature and our ability to actually govern ourselves, I think is also an example of this. But so this is part of the issue. I mean, I think the speed of the news cycle, and now it's gotten so fast with social media. But at the same time, there's also another effect here. And social media is a really great example of where it has become exceptionally powerful. And that has to do with the creation of echo chambers.

• 34:30Demetri Kofinas?

  So we saw this with cable news in the US. Again, I don't know to what degree this was actually the same thing in the UK. But you had these different channels that people came to watch, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, based on their political affiliation. Social media has 10x that or 100x that with algorithmic feeds that are segmented to one person. And I feel like what we are seeing in the US with politicians is that they're essentially becoming influencers and they're having to become influencers in order to succeed at the ballot box. Now, I've seen this in the UK. The first time I saw this in the UK was with Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage was like a phenomenon coming out of the European

• 35:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Parliament. You know, before UKIP ever won any seats in the UK, he was famously at the European Parliament. There were a number of ministers that were there and they were all very colorful. They were all very telegenic, very excellent at gaining media attention. And it wasn't just a social media phenomenon at this point. This was still legacy. I mean, social media was around and it was relevant, but it was really the internet and internet-based media that helped grow Farage's appeal. What are the similarities here, to the extent that you're familiar with what's going on in the United States with influencers, the various people, AOC, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whoever? What are these similarities? Like, what are you seeing? What are the parallels? And I'd love to sort of dig into this a bit with you.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. And Farage here has by far the most TikTok followers of any politician in the UK. He has always been a natural at that kind of media, which comes from, similarly to Trump. I mean, I think they're different in many ways, but one of their similarities is they both have that ability to appear spontaneous and off the cuff and authentic. Whether they are or not, they can appear that way in a way that a conventional politician really struggles to do. And that gives them a huge advantage in an era of, as you say, where politicians can become influencers. And a really interesting difference in this one between the US and the UK is it happened a lot earlier in the US. And therefore, the system is acclimatized more to it over time, whereas in the UK it

• 36:38Speaker 01

  was more of a shock. Because you had deregulation of broadcasting rules in the 1980s, which led to the rise of shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News, which has always been highly partisan and other partisan channels. And you had this sort of complete polarization of the media quite early. You saw that effect coming in very strongly through the 90s with Newt Gingrich and And the sort of Clinton impeachment and so on. We have historically been very reliant on the BBC as the dominant source of news information in the UK and the BBC, for all its flaws, does a pretty good job, I would argue, at trying to be neutral and genuinely trying to not be partisan in either direction.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And until really the social media age, the BBC was absolutely the dominant source of news information. So the social media age has been more of a shock almost in the UK because that polarization, that use of partisan media wasn't really there before and now is in a really, really big way, whether that's through YouTube and TikTok and so on, or we now do have channels like Fox News. We have GB News, which is quite similar to Fox News, just starting to emerge now as a result of this kind of breakthrough against the gatekeeping power of the BBC. So it's a more recent phenomenon and almost having a more concentrated effect as a result of that. And it means you've still got quite conventional politicians like Keir Starmer, like Rishi Sunak,

• 38:05Speaker 01

  in our system with a lot of power, but really struggling to adapt to this new media age. Whereas US politicians have grown up, I guess, in a media environment in which your Fox Newses and MSNBCs have been very powerful.

• 38:20Demetri Kofinas?

  That's right. I mean, that's a good observation. The other thing that is happening in the US, and I'm curious to understand to what degree it's happening in the UK, because my sense is it's not happening in the UK, it's certainly not on this scale. And that has to do with this kind of reckoning that we're going through with respect to the ruling class, where Americans are becoming increasingly suspicious of their rulers and increasingly, I mean, I would say verging on paranoia. And when I use the word conspiracy, I'm not assigning a moral value to it. I'm simply describing what it is. And this fascination, for example, with Jeffrey Epstein, and again, I'm not minimizing the importance of the Jeffrey Epstein story at all. I'm just simply pointing out the narrative structure here.

• 39:03Demetri Kofinas?

  And it fits so perfectly in this pre-existing bias in American society today, which is that essentially the elites are blood-drinking pedophiles, interdimensional child molesters.

• 39:15Demetri Kofinas?

  And this is not like a small thing. It's a very potent narrative. Even if you don't believe it literally, there's a sense of disgust. I mean, Americans are, a huge portion of Americans are disgusted at the ruling class. They find them to be reprehensible people. And so I'm curious like how this compares to the United Kingdom today.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  So I think it's stronger in the US because the US has a much more polarized society and political system still than the UK, although I think there's ways in which we're moving in that direction. But there's definitely elements of it here, too. If you sit in a focus group, as I sometimes do, there is a level of frustration and anger towards politicians of all parties and types. That is new, I think, to me in terms of the level of hostility towards them. And I think that comes partly from this sort of breakdown of traditional media, as we've been talking about. And it comes from a sort of the fact that politics now operates in this sort of goldfish bowl. You can see everything that happens.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  There was always scandals and dirty dealings from politicians going on behind the scenes, but it wasn't necessarily visible in quite the same way as it now is. And when there is something that they do wrong, and they do do things wrong, and they do break the law, and they do get involved in scandals, it's so much more visible now that there's almost a sense that they've got a lot worse, which I don't think they have, particularly certainly not in the UK. I don't think they've got particularly more venal in any way, probably less so, but it's just so much easier to see it now. And you do get plenty of genuine scandals in British and American politics. So you can see how, if that's your sense of it, and you're not part of it, and you don't sort of understand why these things happen, you would start to get this sort

• 41:03Speaker 01

  of level of frustration, especially when cost of living's been so high, when there are all sorts of other domestic problems that you blame government for, that you would get this impression of politics.

• 41:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's talk about ways forward. You argue strongly for radical institutional reform. What do you mean by radical in this context? And why do you believe that incremental reforms will fail in the UK?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Because I think we're reaching the point of where the crisis breaks through and becomes so serious that incremental isn't going to cut it anymore. We have a situation where there is very little support now for any political party. No party in the UK is currently polling over thirty percent consistently. That's never happened before. The government is extraordinarily unpopular, but so was the last government and the Conservatives are still incredibly unpopular. Reform, which is the party that's led by Nigel Farage, this new, new right wing party, is very unpopular with a majority. So you've got this sort of really deep, powerful frustration with the governing class that you were talking about now coming through very powerfully. So just messing about isn't going to cut it.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And if we don't do something pretty radical, soon we're going to end up with a pretty disastrous government doing all the wrong things as a way of dealing with what people consider these frustrations to be, rather than getting in ahead of that happening and fixing some of those problems in advance.

• 42:27Demetri Kofinas?

  So I want to ask you what reforms you think are most urgent, but one more question. Because as I mentioned, Nigel Farage's popularity began, at least from my perspective, I began to notice him in 2011, I think. And we also, in the US, went through a cycle, the Tea Party movement was back in 2008 or so, and the Ron Paul revolution was also around that time. And so I was already plugged into a lot of these ideas and a lot of this discontent in that era. And I feel like a lot of it was then generational. I'm a millennial, so it was a part of this millennial cohort. So I feel like in some sense, I mean, my sense is that this has been building for a very long time and it was simply a matter of generating enough political buy-in, getting

• 43:12Demetri Kofinas?

  enough people to be dissatisfied to be able to actually get to the point where we are today. I'm curious, one, if that resonates with you, and two, how long you think this has actually been building in the UK? When did we begin to see tangible signs of people's dissatisfaction with the ruling class and the systems of governance?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that politicians have never been massively popular, but I think... You mentioned the Tea Party, and I think there is a reason that that and Farage's breakthrough happened around the same time, which is the global financial crisis happened then. And the Tea Party movement really initially emerged out of opposition to bailing out the banks and created this sort of opportunity for anti-establishment anger on left and right in a way to sort of foment around the same frustrations with this sort of society that seemed completely rigged for the wealthy and powerful. And in a similar way, Farage got his breakthrough around that point. Now, he wasn't particularly talking about the financial crisis, but I think it was

• 44:11Speaker 01

  that sense of dislocation caused by the crisis and trying to find someone to blame for this sort of anger that emerged as a result. And in our case, it was they pointed the finger at immigrants particularly and at the European Union. And initially, a lot of this anger and this frustration was put into a movement to leave the European Union, and that was Farage's big cause and UKIP's big cause. And they got the referendum, they were able to get the Conservatives to agree to the referendum, and then that led to Brexit. But when Brexit didn't resolve any of those frustrations, as it was never going to, it's now morphed into something more dissolute, but probably wider spread, and with a real, real particular focus on immigration.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  So I'd say immigration is probably the one big unifying point for anger on the right, certainly now, that is where all of this sort of loosely formed anger since 2008 and so has ended up. And in America, you can sort of follow a similar path where a lot of that anger got put into the election of Trump, but then that hasn't actually resolved the anger either. So you're now starting to see some of that boil up around the Epstein case and some of Trump's online supporters starting to turn against him and so on. So it's created a very volatile situation in both the UK and the US and a lot of other countries around the world as well, which have undergone similar journeys.

• 45:34Demetri Kofinas?

  You know, Nigel's appeal to nationalism.

• 45:39Demetri Kofinas?

  When we're comparing the US and the UK, it was unique to the UK because his equivalent, which was Ron Paul and the Ron Paul movement, was much more focused on systems of governance and, you know, taking the government increasingly out of its role in the economy. And that's understandable because Nigel was also responding to the sense of an overbearing bureaucracy coming from Brussels. And people don't know, I don't know how many people know this, but I interviewed Nigel back in 2012 on my old television program and I spent quite a bit of time with him afterwards. We went for drinks and we spoke quite a bit. And I actually had met him and a number of the other ministers and some of the people on his team. And there was, this is the other thing that's really interesting when you compare Nigel now to Trump.

• 46:23Demetri Kofinas?

  These guys had a kind of an air of being somewhat rock stars. They dressed in a very flashy way and they were entertaining. I mean Nigel was incredibly entertaining and he was willing to denigrate anyone and everyone on the floor of European Parliament. And Trump in that sense is very similar. He's very entertaining and he's willing to denigrate. And I think that part of his appeal is simply his entertainment value. And I'm curious to what degree that has also been true for Nigel, for the folks at UKIP and now for Reform.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, and if you look at Reform, they really are the Nigel Farage party. There isn't a lot beneath him. I mean, they have an infrastructure and an organization, but if you asked your average Reform voter to name another person associated with the party other than Farage, they wouldn't be able to. It is built around his personality in the way that the MAGA movement is built around Trump's personality. And as you say, in both cases, it's partly because they're very effective at using humor, they're very effective at seeming spontaneous and authentic and often being spontaneous and authentic and not seeming to be so uptight and worried and on message as your average politician, which is very attractive to people who are very fed up with the normal way of doing political business.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  But one interesting question as a result of that is the degree to which both Trump and Farage are sui generis. Can they be replaced? So, you know, neither of them are young. Trump is a bit older than Farage. And they can't go on forever. Will the Republicans find someone who can replace Trump? And have the same kind of impact that he does. Because I look at people like J D Vance or Ron DeSantis, and they don't have that ability that he has to that sort of spontaneous human. I look at people around Reform and I can't see anyone with the ability that Farage has to do that. So so how much is it about these individuals who just have this ability in the social media age to have to cut through? And how much is it about the underlying movement beneath them?

• 48:21Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'm curious, what I think we started this conversation of this, where we were to an end of this conversation, speaking about reforms and radical institutional reform. What reforms do you think are most urgent for the UK and why?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  So decentralization, I would put very high on the list for the reasons that we've been talking about. I think that until you decentralize, until you take some of the powers out of Whitehall, it's simply not going to be able to operate in a strategic fashion. And we are starting to see that a little bit. We've now got more powerful regional mayors than we've ever had before, but they are still nowhere near as powerful as federal officials in the US or Germany and so on. So I I think we need to go much, much further to allow them to raise their own taxes, to allow them to make decisions across a far wider range of public policy, to free up Whitehall, to to be more strategic, to have that more strategic kind of conversation

• 49:19Speaker 01

  about big issues like climate change and AI and financial systems. I think that we absolutely need to deal with the fact that we have no real proper scrutiny of legislation and what government is doing. I think that's been disastrous. So I propose quite a lot of ways you could strengthen Parliament, not to sort of introduce the level of checks and balances that you in theory have in the US Constitution, but to at least have a system in which there is meaningful scrutiny of legislation as it goes through the House Commons and where MPs have a much more meaningful role as legislators, which they don't really at the moment, compared to a senator, say, in the US. So that's really important. I talk a lot about, we haven't really talked about. Of civil service and judiciary, but I talk a lot about how you can make changes there too,

• 50:02Speaker 01

  to make those bits of the government more effective. When it comes to media, that's a lot harder because obviously I I believe in free speech and a free press. I don't think you can start interfering with the way media operates and we can't delete social media or the internet and it has advantages, of course, too. But there are some things you could do, particularly looking at media ownership and concentrations of media ownership and changing the way that government thinks about communications to accept that we're just not in the era anymore where you can control the media cycle in the way that it used to and that you need to have a totally different approach to communications. That is more in line with the sort of Farage-Trump model, although certainly not necessarily saying and doing what they believe and say.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  So there's a lot in there that I think needs to change and pretty fast because right now government is struggling here.

• 50:49Demetri Kofinas?

  So how do you ensure long term commitment to reform, given the political incentives and constraints that any government would face, any future government would face?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  It's a good question and you can never guarantee that a future government will agree with what you've done. That's one of the pluses and minuses of democracy. It's in the nature of democracy. But my sense is that once you start decentralizing, once you start boosting the power of parliament and you do it very openly and explicitly, it's quite hard to undo. Because in undoing it, you are very explicitly stating that you are trying to take total executive control of the system. And it may be that a reform government or something like that would try and do that and there's nothing you can do to stop that. But it's still worth trying to at least force them to undo it if nothing else. So and once you sort of just take decentralization example, once you have these powerful regional mayors,

• 51:42Speaker 01

  it's quite hard to take power away from them because they will oppose that. And you have a group of people arguing actively for keeping local powers, which we don't have at the moment. So it's definitely worth trying, though absolutely you can never guarantee anything.

• 51:55Demetri Kofinas?

  Is there an example of such radical institutional reform, either in the UK or internationally, that you would point to to give you hope that this is something that's possible?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  We haven't been particularly big on radical institutional reform in the UK.

• 52:08Demetri Kofinas?

  That's not, yeah, I wouldn't describe Brits as radicals.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  It's not our standard way of doing things, but there have been in the past. I mean, I talked earlier about our crisis of democracy in the early part of the 20th century. You had a government then that very fundamentally changed the balance between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in a way that gave Commons, the Commons, control and stopped the unelected House of Lords, who were almost all aristocrats at the time, from blocking the introduction of the welfare state, things like pensions and so on. And that was a very dramatic moment of constitutional reform in the way that we do it, because we don't have a written constitution. In the 19th century, you had the creation of an independent meritocratic civil service, which we had not had before. So there have been moments when we've done these big radical reforms, just not for a very long time. So it feels like it's very overdue that we have a look again at some of these systems

• 52:56Speaker 01

  that have been around for 100, 150 years.

• 53:00Demetri Kofinas?

  So last question for you, Sam. What might the future hold for Britain if these governance issues remain unaddressed, do you think?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I fear that we are heading in some ways in the same direction as the US is at the moment. I think there is a chance, although I wouldn't say a likelihood yet, or certainly a certainty, that reform will win the next election or certainly do very well at the next election here, which isn't for another four years. And that they would take advantage of a lot of the flaws in our system that I have pointed out to do some pretty dramatically unpleasant things to the country in ways that I think would be extremely destructive to our economy, to our values. And it's possible that we need that as the crisis that triggers other parties, other more sort of traditional, conventional parties, to step up and say, we need more radical reform.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  But I don't really want to have to go through that in order to get there. And I'm hoping that our current government can speed things up a bit and realize that if they don't start to change the way that they are governing, they are going to be in a lot of trouble in a few years' time.

• 54:08Demetri Kofinas?

  Sam, this was wonderful. I really enjoyed reading your book. You know, it gave me, I knew very little, I mean, I still know very little about British politics, but it was a very useful primer, not only for understanding British politics, but also to draw comparisons and think in new ways about politics here in the United States. So, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 54:29Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.