Why Government Doesn’t Work Anymore | Steve Baker

This is a long-form interview centered on Baker’s broad thesis that modern government no longer works because it has escaped effective constraints. He frames the post–World War II era as a long drift into managerialism, where voters accepted more state power, more intervention, and eventually chronic borrowing and money creation. In his telling, the UK now faces a “crisis of control by the state,” not a failure of markets, and the practical symptoms are visible in taxation, regulation, housing costs, and living standards. A major strand of the conversation is Baker’s claim that political incentives are broken. He says ministers are often incompetent or disinterested, civil servants are structured to cope with that, and elected politicians mostly optimize for reelection rather than governing well. …

1. Baker’s central claim is that Britain is in a long-running institutional and fiscal decay driven by managerialism, state overreach, and fiat money.
2. He sees the real problem as constraints on power, not a shortage of technocratic fixes or a need for more state activism.
3. He believes politicians mostly follow public incentives, so lower spending and tighter limits on government require public opinion to shift first.
4. He argues that money creation is the most dangerous state power because it drives inflation, unfairness, debt, and social conflict.
5. He thinks housing unaffordability and falling living standards are downstream effects of monetary and fiscal excess.
6. He wants stronger democratic accountability mechanisms, especially recall of MPs and more active party membership.
7. He warns that polarization, identity preference, and demagoguery can create social fragmentation and even violence.
8. He frames his politics as peaceful, lawful, and liberty-first, not revolutionary in the violent sense.

• Baker treats public preference for higher spending/lower taxes as a main cause, but that may understate how much policy is driven by elite choice, lobbying, or institutional inertia.
• He repeatedly attributes broad social and economic decline to fiat money, but the causal chain is asserted more than demonstrated in detail.
• His preferred remedies are normatively clear but operationally vague: local party participation, recall, and persuasion are not enough on their own to produce the scale of change he wants.
• The claim that a peaceful mass withdrawal of consent could realistically force change is not well evidenced and seems highly uncertain.
• His critique of migration, unions, welfare, and identity preference is philosophically consistent, but the interview often shifts from structural critique to culture-war generalization without hard empirical support.
• The theological conclusion is coherent within his worldview, but it does not resolve the practical political question of how to build a governing majority.