Your local playground, tomorrow
The Coalition of the Gritted Teeth have announced that funding for loads of new playgrounds has been withdrawn – and up to 1300 new and redesigned playgrounds now won’t go ahead. Cue howls of anguish:
Parent Emma Kane has worked with children in Hook Norton to set up a £47000 playground scheme which is now unlikely to go ahead. She said: “It’s insane to cut what is such a small amount of money.”
Years of suckling at the public teat have lead us to the point where people can blithely say that £47000 of other people’s money is a “small amount of money.”
Missing from the tale – framed as it is in the language of drastic cuts and small blonde children crying against the window – are a few facts. Firstly, even if you allow that £47,000 is a relatively modest sum in the specific instance, the wider cost of the scheme – some £235,000,000 most certainly isn’t. Secondly, the provision of play for children has increased massively already thanks to a flourishing private sector.
Dozens of otherwise abandoned buildings have been put to use as play gyms – with ball pools, slides, trampolines and toys, augmented with food and drink, seating for parents, clean toilets… and a roof!
By contrast, a couple of my local recs have had these new playgrounds installed recently and – of course! – the swings have been torn off and there are pictures of vaginas scrawled everywhere. And out of school hours, you can find any number of recalcitrant teenagers playing on the slides while swearing and drinking lager. Another year and you can bet your marmalade that the floor will be littered with broken glass and condoms and there’ll be vaginas and swastikas for your 4 year old to look at (as well as Kelly’s phone number – apparently she’ll do it for a quid).
Obviously, that’s not right – and if we could find a way to police these things adequately (hint: cops on the fucking beat) then I would love my kids to run riot around such places in the open air instead of inside an industrial unit. But as it is, it is transparently a futile exercise for the state to chuck a quarter of a billion quid of everyone else’s money at these schemes.