From the Breckon Hill community enterprise in Middlesbrough:
Okay. You could argue that I’ve lost all perspective, but in my lefty way, I’ve started to suspect that George Osborne would prefer just to blanket places like Middlesbrough’s Breckon Hill community centre in napalm.
The centre has a daycentre for adults with disabilities, an accredited ESOL training programme, back-to-work support for people who are looking for jobs, computer classes, a youth club, a cafe with affordable meals and so on.
And that means they’re all bloody well here, aren’t they, George? – people with learning and physical disabilities, worried locals whose cafes and takeaways are going bust in the slump, youth offenders who want work experience on projects (that were once) funded by council, discarded public sector workers who want to retrain for jobs that don’t exist – you’ve got the whole, lowborn lot of them, George, right here in one building. You could pretend concern for their service needs and blather on about Big Society on Dave’s behalf, or you could just cut the paperwork and open a can on them. Boom.