HAVING once seen unicycling for jobless youths paid for out of taxes here in East Lancashire, I find it hardly surprising to discover that, in Birmingham, project workers have hit upon trapeze lessons at public expense for drug addicts - in a scheme offensively called 'Getting High' - in the belief that it will offer an alternative uplift to doing drugs and breaking into cars to steal stuff to pay for them.

Call me cynical, but the ones I suspect who get most benefit out of these barmy notions - safari tours for serial young offenders, free driving lessons for car thieves and so forth - are the soppy social-worker sorts who dream them up, perhaps with the continuance of their own publicly-funded jobs in mind.

If young dole drawers, auto-crime perpetrators and junkies need schemes to make them useful members of society, I would have thought that, for a start, ones that see to the removal of litter and graffiti from our streets would be more beneficial to the taxpayers than circus antics, the need for which, I would guess, is slightly less tremendous.

Doesn't anyone have the power to chuck a bucket of cold water over the sponging do-gooder clowns who dream up this sort of nonsense?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.