The tasks hat have been mentioned are the same as those given to people on community service because of their crimes - so people unable to find work will be labelled as criminals.

Something has been done before. When my mother was growing up in Sussex between the wars, during the Depression, she met gangs of men working on road making. Well educated men with degrees - and those were not easily got back then - professionals, labouring on the roads, and a lot of it hand work, not mechanical. The attitude seemed to have been that it was the government's duty to make work for those who had been thrown out of jobs by the financial situation. Not that the workless should be treated punitively as if it was their fault. And they were pretty good roads.

Clearly one of the past classics their public schools exposed them to was not Gibbon. Backed up by recent archaeology, it turns out, he posited an Empire destroyed from within. The homeless, workless, moneyless Bacaudae roamed Gaul and Britain, and the cities and the infrastructure fell apart. If there's nothing left to lose, people will turn resentment into action. Especially if they didn't vote for what those who are not sharing their hardships have imposed on them.

Penny