Something has gone badly wrong with the management and culture of the bureaucracies that stand between us and economic and financial apocalypse.

In February, the International Monetary Fund flayed itself for institutional and intellectual failings that led it to ignore the scale and interconnectedness of global financial risks. Now Kitty Ussher, a former minister in the UK Treasury, and Imogen Walford have interviewed ex-civil servants, advisers, ministers and Treasury insiders and produced a report for Demos, the British think-tank, about deficiencies in Britain’s most powerful government department. Read more