The subtitle of this book is ‘Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It’, referring to the governance of the UK and its public services. If that interests you, then this is a must-read. It has a lot more to say about the problems than it does about solutions, but I don’t mind that. People who are capable of analysing deep-rooted social or political problems are rarely the best people to design practical solutions, or versa.

I do have several criticisms of it, which I will explain below, but none of them would make it any less worth reading. It is easy to read and logically structured. Its biggest message is that Britain, and particularly England, is over-centralised. Successive governments have taken on more powers than they are capable of exercising. They have reacted to successive failures by centralising still further. Ministers, and particularly prime ministers, have become overworked micro-managers, caught in a loop of fire-fighting and media management, with little capability to plan for the future.

Freedman has seen this first-hand as a political advisor in the Department for Education. He interviewed a range of people from inside and outside of governments spanning recent decades, as I did for Roads, Runways and Resistance. I can vouch for some of Freedman’s findings about the emasculation of local government and the wastefulness of distributing public money through competitive bidding.

The most eye-opening chapter deals with the parasitic companies which mainly exist to bid for government contracts. It starts with the sorry tale of a children’s home run by a pornographer and a reality TV star, and goes on to describe the four big companies which dominate the market for everything from court translators to warning systems for incoming nuclear missiles. If you have ever wondered why we are paying record-level taxes for such poor public services, this chapter explains a big part of the reason. The book is non partisan: governments of all stripes have helped to create this situation, and any new government will suffer from them. The criticism of private contractors may appeal more to the left, but the waste of taxpayers’ money ought to “infuriate any true Conservatives”.

Freedman’s only clear recommendation for change is that central government needs to rebuild local government, devolving both power and money, including tax-raising powers, to councils and elected regional authorities. The current government has made a few timid steps in that direction, but without the tax-raising powers which similar bodies have in most other advanced democracies.

Whilst I agree with Freedman about short-term decision-making, I would challenge his claim that if only we could build more big capital projects, like HS2, the UK economy would grow faster and everyone would be better off. That is a flaky piece of conventional wisdom, which I have challenged elsewhere.

Those were only passing remarks. Freedman is not an economist; most of the book is focussed quite narrowly on the governance of the UK. That is both its strength as a book and its weakness as a social study. It acknowledges that other countries also have their problems, but provides few comparisons. It implies that most other democracies work better than Britain and pays little attention to broader and deeper global trends.

Over-centralisation is one reason why governments are becoming over-worked and less effective but it’s not the only one, and that trend is not confined to Britain. As I have written elsewhere, peak complexity is a tendency found in all advanced societies to complexify over time, causing many of the problems Freedman describes, and some he doesn’t. He rightly excoriates the failures of private companies working for government, but makes no reference to the wider failures of the private sector, in its dealings with private customers.

The other trend, which every political writer seems to acknowledge, though most then skim over, is climate change. There is no sense in this book that climate change is the biggest threat we face, one which will exacerbate or supersede the problems people worry about today. Freedman is right to identify political short-termism as a serious weakness, but like most mainstream commentators, he fails to connect that insight to the growing warnings from climate scientists, which politicians and most of the public prefer to ignore.