Word.ws English Dictionary

bleeding stump

bleeding stump noun: a deliberate disruptive or high-profile reduction in a public service, intended to demonstrate the impact of funding cuts and motivate opposition.

Noun

bleeding stump (plural bleeding stumps)

  1. (UK) A deliberate disruptive or high-profile reduction in a public service, intended to demonstrate the impact of funding cuts and motivate opposition.
    • Looking over my shoulder , I anticipate that Conservative Members of Parliament will drum that message home vehemently and try to spell out to parents that the "bleeding stump" syndrome does not exist if the local authority is efficient.1995, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).: House of Commons official report
    • In the meantime, the financial crisis of the new hospital trusts at Guy's and Bradford Infirmary were used as the bleeding stump strategy to signal to the Government that the reforms were not likely to benefit the health service.2005 August 9, Maurice Mullard, The Politics of Public Expenditure, Routledge, →ISBN, page 1987

Forms of bleeding stump

pluralbleeding stumps

Origin of bleeding stump

Coined by Christopher Hood and Maurice Wright in 1981 in Big Government in Hard Times. The implication is that the public service is deliberately cutting off its own hand to make a dramatic point.

Questions about bleeding stump

What does bleeding stump mean?
Bleeding stump means a deliberate disruptive or high-profile reduction in a public service, intended to demonstrate the impact of funding cuts and motivate opposition.
What part of speech is bleeding stump?
Bleeding stump is a noun.
What is the plural of bleeding stump?
The plural of bleeding stump is bleeding stumps.

Words near bleeding stump in the dictionary

  1. bleeding Nora
  2. bleeding oak crust
  3. bleeding out
  4. bleeding red ink
  5. bleeding sickness
  6. bleeding stump
  7. bleeding the monkey
  8. bleeding time
  9. bleeding time test
  10. bleeding time tests
  11. bleeding times

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bleeding stump (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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