Managerial consultants replaced productive workers without improving on the earlier inefficiency.

Evidence

Let’s dispense with this idea, once and for all, that New Labour has “improved” anything. New Labour is the worst of all worlds: Thatcherist managerialism without the Thatcherite attack on vested interests. In the pre-Thatcher 1970s, it took six carworkers to do the job of one; in the post-Thatcher Noughties, it takes six consultants to do the job of none (since the mission statement wasn’t worth writing in the first place). Same decadence, different beneficiaries. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1392

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘consultants doing the job of none’ line connects to David Graeber’s bullshit-jobs thesis and Fisher’s wider critique of capitalist realism.