Can't do

Brief snapshot

A typical scene in the borough at this point:

'Look at that guy!' one of the People's Party's female councillors shrieked, pointing a pale and shaking finger across the negotiating table at one of the many union representatives who'd turned up to this meeting to fight with her about the council's plans to cut jobs and funding at an important local welfare and benefits advice centre.

The advice centre was much utilised by a very large number of the borough's underprivileged residents - they needed the centre's help to negotiate the nation's complex welfare systems and they needed the face-to-face service that the centre provided if they were ever to figure out their entitlements. People came to the centre in their thousands. And they weren't all losers, as the People's Party would have the people believe. Many were abused wives, or people from war-torn countries, or people who'd been sick, or injured through no fault of their own and needed help getting back to the point where they could provide for themselves.

The councillor was trying to convince the union reps at the meeting that the best way to save the advice centre from People's Party plans to cut funding to it was to find something else to talk about and let her head down to her favourite local.

'It's the way the world is going,' the councillor told her stunned subjects. 'People can't keep expecting us to fund local services on the scale that we have up until now. We don't even really know if people want these services, anyway. My theory is that if people really want this service, they'll learn how to raise the money for it themselves. We're happy to send them on fundraising courses. You need skills to understand that sector. If they don't want to raise the money, they won't bother.'

A dreadful silence fell. The union reps were appalled. It didn't take a genius to work out that closing the advice centre would be a disaster for the thousands who used it, and the 20 or so people who worked in it. It was almost as though the councillor had forgotten that some of the region's most deprived wards were in her very own borough and that the people in them - the councillor's very own voting subjects, who, at the last election, had bought into the People's Party line about putting the needy first - had no hope of housing or feeding themselves without help.

Where would they live if they didn't have anyone to ask about applying for council housing? How would they buy groceries and eat if they didn't know which benefits they were entitled to, or how to apply for them? There was also the council's very own constitutional responsibilities to think about. Which patsy among them – the staff, that was - would be given the fatal task of making the equalities impact assessment for this horseshit fit? The reps from the Policy, Strategies and Equalities division were already looking at each other, and pointing.

One union rep seemed especially disgusted. He stood up before the councillor, flexed his hand in front of his trousers, and pretended to have a drawn-out wank. A mighty cheer went up in the draughty hall. The councillor was furious. She decided to try to humiliate the rep herself.

'Look!' she yelled over the crowd noise, directing the pale and shaking finger at the man. 'Look at him! Get that negative attitude, everybody! That's exactly the kind of union moron who can't take the idea of change. You crass idiots will get nothing out of life while you follow that kind of idiot around, let me tell you. He's exactly the kind of loser who opposes modernisation for the hell of it. I bet he couldn't even tell you what modernisation is. He just doesn't like it for the hell of it. He's what I call a Can't Do! Yes! Look at him! Look at him. He's a Can't Do Ha ha ha! He's a Can't Do!'

The man didn't blink, even when the councillor waved Security over to humble him. 'A Can't Do, eh? he said, as the Security guys, good men all, pretended to blindfolded him with the mayor's mothballed Twinned with Baghdad sash. 'That is new, man. That is very new. Usually, she just calls me a Can't.'

Click the Chapter One heading for the next bit