July 15, 2010

The Parade of Bleeding Stumps

By Adam Shaw
As public spending becomes an increasingly important issue for the November elections, be prepared to see the left engaging in hysterical scare-mongering about the potential effect of spending cuts. This has been seen recently in Britain, where such scare-mongering already has its own label -- "The Parade of the Bleeding Stumps."This unsavory phrase originates in British government bureaucracy and darkly refers to the Civil Service's clever response to the threat of spending cuts. The idea is that whenever cuts in a department are demanded by elected ministers, civil service bureaucrats respond by ignoring the many cases of waste, inefficiency, or general uselessness in the department, and instead tell the minister that the only way to cut spending is to axe necessary or politically important services and initiatives. So for example, when a government minister demands cuts to a hospital, the bureaucrats hide the two hundred administrators in a back room and haul out the...(Read Full Article)