While speaking about people being undermined, the way the Government has tried to pretend the community employment scheme as it was introduced at the height of an unemployment crisis is the same as how the scheme works now is astonishing. It was fashionable in the 1980s to talk about the middle way, neither public nor private. Community employment schemes fit firmly into that. Of course it was true that in many cases the scheme did not result in a higher uptake of jobs in what the Progressive Democrats would term the "real economy".