Claims of an overfunded public sector contradict frontline workers’ experience of austerity

Evidence

For months now, we’ve been sold the story that public services are “bloated”. There’s no doubt that New Labour mismanaged public services and wasted money — on managers, on market Stalinist control procedures imported in from business, and on GPs’ ludicrously overinflated salaries. But the narrative of an overfunded public sector produces cognitive dissonance for those of us who have actually been delivering frontline public services in the last ten years, where we’ve been expected to do more work for less money and with fewer resources. If those were the good times, you can only feel a shudder of dread anticipating what it will be like when things are bad. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1467

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the ‘bloated public sector’ narrative vs. lived experience of casualised frontline work — useful case study in how political narrative decouples from workers’ reality.
• XREF: connects to: Frontline workers experienced reported “overfunding” as resource scarcity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1467

Broader Connections

• Frontline workers experienced reported “overfunding” as resource scarcity #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1467