Pragmatism can be a cover for so many wrongs. It starts out as just cutting through the red tape, but ends up justifying prejudice, discrimination and self interest.

Pragmatism in the public sector is recognising there is no choice but to outsource services, reduce management posts, make redundancies, remove services we can no longer afford, lower expectations we can no longer meet, target limited resources on the few, shrink the more expensive public sector and make more use of the cheaper private sector to provide public services.