While politicians rail against “quangos” and flexible working, the reality is a civil service stretched to its limits and holding essential public services together, warns Roz Foyer.

As sure as night follows day, an election campaign and tightening fiscal conditions will presage intensifying attacks on public service workers.

The past few weeks it has been the turn of civil servants.  Brilliantly funny though it may be, “Yes Minister” has a lot to answer for. Maybe politicians believe that the public believes that your archetypal civil servant looks and sounds like the series’ central character James George Hacker, Baron Hacker of Islington, KG, PC, BSc (LSE), Hon. D.Phil.  The truth is of course different. Not that we need to apologise for the section of the civil service which supports government.  Without these people, our democracy would grind immediately to a halt. 

However, imagining that this is an adequate description of the work that all civil servants do is like saying the NHS is only made up of doctors or that the only people who make our universities tick are lecturers.  

Last week, within the basket of nastiness and economic illiteracy that is the Reform UK manifesto for Scotland, Lord Malcolm Ian Offord, Baron Offord of Garvel, was the latest out of the traps to announce a bonfire of the quangos.  The detail of which departments and which services would be scythed under his masterplan are still to be detailed.  

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