As a public servant, I am expected to consistently remain politically neutral and subservient. While I have bitten my tongue thus far on the fiasco of a government that we are currently subjected to, I can’t any longer (UK ministers ‘picking number out of air’ for civil service job cuts, says union, 13 May). The constant attacks on us by the prime minister and his cabinet are exhausting, unfair and inaccurate. I manage nearly 60 staff, many of whom joined during the pandemic, and the pace, quality and quantity of their work is on a scale I have never before seen. The efficiency we are currently able to deliver is unparalleled. Yet still they want more. Boris Johnson says his experience of working from home involved “an awful lot of time” making coffee and eating cheese. Give us a break. We are a decade deep into cuts and pay freezes and we are tired, fed up and angry. We have held this country together for the last two years and worked tirelessly and thanklessly. The productivity that hybrid ways of working has enabled has, in my view, created an unsustainably high pace of work – I see people working far too hard, not too little. To have to put up with the constant rhetoric about the lazy civil service makes my blood boil. Johnson may be sitting at home eating cheese (and drinking wine) while at work, but I can assure you that the rest of us simply don’t have the time. Name and address supplied • Heather Stewart is right to point to some of the unfortunate side effects of civil service cuts (Boris Johnson’s civil service job cuts are ambitious – and ideological, 13 May). No doubt there are staff in the service who have views that are contrary to the current philosophy, but the convention was (and I am sure still is) that you carried out your work regardless. I worked for many years at the Department of Health, and in the 1990s the then Conservative government became obsessed with reducing the staff headcount. This led to many older staff members being offered early retirement, but this resulted in a significant loss in institutional memory – so many of the new retirees were rehired at consultants’ rates, which defeated the point of the exercise. It also created the illusion that staff numbers were apparently being reduced when, in fact, the overall figure was more or less the same, the hiring of consultants being justified on the basis that they supposedly provided expertise that was otherwise not there. Many of them were hired for short-term cover but stayed on for long periods. One consultant friend at the department discovered, when he attended a colleague’s leaving party, that he was the longest-serving member in the branch. You hope that politicians will learn from such things, but there seems little hope of that in the current political climate. Dr Richard Carter Putney, London • The government would do better to hold off cutting jobs and have a blitz on slashing the number and length of forms. Applying for probate for my late mother’s straightforward estate demanded that I complete 13 different forms totalling 60 pages. Sam White Lewes, East Sussex • It’s hard to know whether to laugh at Boris Johnson copying Jim Hacker in Yes Minister by demanding huge and arbitrarily chosen numbers of civil servants to fire just to show he’s doing something, or weep as his only noticeable response to the cost of living crisis is to make 90,000 more people unemployed. Mark Lewinski Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.