The Cheating Classes: how Britain's elite abuse their power Sue Cameron Simon & Schuster, 259pp, £17.99 ISBN 068485130X

Lord Hailsham, in 1976, said: "I have reached the conclusion that our constitution is wearing out." Twenty-five years on, Sue Cameron, a former Newsnight presenter, thinks the need to repair the tattered fabric is urgent. Evidence that faith in government, institutions and the professions has collapsed can be seen in people's readiness to take to the streets and protest. Cameron cites Portsmouth demonstrations against paedophiles, fuel protests and the recent Countryside Alliance marches as dramatic manifestations of a widespread feeling that our democracy is a sham.

She takes the stories of eight individuals whose lives have been wrecked by the "cheating classes" of her title - politicians, public servants, professionals, bankers. Those cheated are "ordinary people - competent, upstanding, articulate people - who find they have no comeback against unscrupulous officials who treat them in a manifestly unjust way". The cheating classes - what Cameron calls "the System" - get away with it by "secrecy, delay and self-regulation".

Her case studies range from an aristocratic farmer struggling to survive the foot-and-mouth crisis, through a professor whose son is killed in a train accident and who cannot force Thames Trains to release a report of the incident, to a policeman who falls foul of the Child Support Agency. Their stories are woeful indictments of bureaucratic stupidity, carelessness or incompetence. Sometimes Cameron suggests that there are also conspiracies: she twice repeats the rural myth that the government had stockpiled the material for slaughtering and burning millions of animals a year before the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Perhaps she believes it.

But she fails to convince that the perpetrators of the woes visited on her protagonists form a cohesive group warranting the description (and book title) "cheating classes". Despite the drum roll, the villains of her eight stories are not overweeningly ambitious politicians or megalomaniac industrialists or public servants seeking kickbacks. They are not often on the financial make, either. The "cheats" who wreck lives seem more often arrogant and self-serving than venal. They are, on the whole, men and women who do their jobs. They make the rules, police the rules and apply them without much humanity. Which is not to deny that their actions can have devastating consequences: for example, in the case of Hetty, where a local authority was prepared to spend £750 a day in legal costs to try to recover £533 council tax from a pensioner and then send her to prison rather than compromise on the rate of repayment.

It is hard, too, to disagree with Cameron's wider thesis that bureaucratised Britain offers fewer and fewer safeguards to the individual. We all encounter the evidence daily in the petty tyrannies of privatised parking regulators, councils that are more efficient at collecting tax than rubbish, call-centres where the answer you need can never be given and frequent reminders that trusted institutions such as banks and post offices are no longer working for our good or, indeed, any common good other than profit. But are these the frustrations of modernity or evidence, as Cameron supposes, of a new ruthless elite that is rigging the rules to its benefit?

"You can be rich, able and articulate - little good will it do you if the cheating classes put a black spot by your name," writes Cameron, introducing the story of how the rigidity of the planning rules lost Maurice and Audrey Balchin their dream home. Cameron's argument is not that Whitehall and, later, the ombudsman were vindictive or legally wrong in how they applied or interpreted the regulations. But in sticking to the letter of the law, all involved knew that the Balchins had been unfairly treated; yet none had the will or courage to attempt to correct it. "Perhaps it would help," argues Cameron, "if we could find ways of making them accept a measure of personal responsibility for treating individuals fairly."

Well, yes, that would be nice, but it would not go far towards satisfying the fuel protesters or Countryside Alliance (nor, indeed, the dissenters and victims she doesn't mention, such as peace marchers, public sector trade unionists, the homeless, the unemployed).

Cameron is light on prescription, but she is a heavyweight analyst of official malpractice. And within her own tales, there is a powerful indictment of one weapon in the armoury of any would-be member of the cheating classes: official secrecy. She gives a lengthy account of the shameful retreat by Labour from its pre-1997 commitment to a strong Freedom of Information Act. Professor Godfrey Fowler, the father of one of Cameron's case studies, is waiting for the implementation of the now diluted act in order to find out how his son died. It should have been in force this year, but he will have to wait until 2005. Apparently, government staff need more training in openness.

Barbara Gunnell works for the Observer

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