The dazzling new Salmon youth centre opened in May, a palace to replace the old Victorian settlement that has nurtured Bermondsey's young people for generations. Tommy Steele used to come here, and he donated professional-quality lighting for the new performance space.
A magnificent sports hall, climbing wall, kitchen for cooking classes, office space for young people starting their own businesses, counselling rooms for those needing help, a music studio and an art room offer every kind of activity to the 1,700 young people coming here weekly. Labour's MyPlace programme has opened 12 of these youth centres with another 57 in the pipeline, lottery money already safely committed. The dream was for a palace for young people in every deprived area. Polls asking what would stop antisocial behaviour always put "somewhere for young people to go" at the top of voters' wish lists.
But beautiful buildings are not much use without youth workers, counsellors, sports, arts and music professionals to run clubs, teams and classes. The Salmon centre has just lost 80% of its funding from its 48 streams as state funds for the young dry up. Half its staff have gone, losing irreplaceable experience built up over years. Youth services are not statutory – councils don't have to provide any – so they have been the hardest hit as local authorities struggle to cover basic care for frail old people and at-risk children. The meagre remnants of funds still given to councils for youth services are not ring-fenced, but lost in the general pot of thin gruel.
Overall, the voluntary sector has lost £4.5bn. Gone is the Youth Opportunities Fund. Closing too are Connexions services, which got lost children back on their feet with counselling and careers guidance. A report from the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services – the heart of the "big society" – lists the demolished programmes in areas of deprivation, which hit the same young people who lose their Education Maintenance Allowance. With the Future Jobs Fund, 100,000 good jobs are gone, along with the Young Person's Guarantee, which promised training or a job to the 20% of young people now unemployed.
Crime, pregnancy and drug addiction will rise, now that 20% of the young have no work, yet all specific funds for those programmes have vanished. Brook, the acclaimed young people's sexual health clinics, are being cut. Stockton has just shut every youth service, including a Brook clinic that had dramatically cut the local teenage pregnancy rate. There is no money now for hostels: the Northampton YMCA has lost virtually all funds for taking in vulnerable young people.
Instead, Cameron's National Citizens' Service, costing a fraction of all this, will give 30,000 16-year-olds a summer course with two residential weeks to include "tough physical challenges and a community component". Mark Blundell, longtime head of the Salmon centre, says what his young people need is not a one-off but consistent help from childhood to adulthood, from people they trust in a safe place. The reason Bermondsey is not plagued by gangs, he says, is that the centre has always been here. But proving the value of youth work in statistics is hard. Heart-rending and heart-warming stories pour out of him, young people given second chances by discovering something they're good at. You only have to meet the people there to see the good it does.
Someone told Simon Hughes I was on his local patch, and I was surprised to get a call from him. So how does he defend this social vandalism? He says the centre always knew funds would be tight; they must use volunteers, attract the young bankers moving into the area to rent it for badminton, attract private sponsors – "Yes, it's a competitive market." The centre already tries all that, but corporations only want to send staff for two days painting walls that don't need painting to tick their social responsibility box: what's needed is good people coming every week so that they know the children.
So what is Simon Hughes, Lib Dem deputy leader and local MP, doing offering to sell coalition tuition fee policies to schools, when the Aimhigher programme, with its summer schools, university visits, masterclasses and mentoring to encourage deprived young people, has just been axed? Why not demand it be saved, along with the EMA? Why support such cuts when he can see the damage on his own home turf? He was a youth worker once.His answers are the usual: yes, the cuts are draconian but just wait until "UK plc is enjoying high growth and success, and it will all be worth it."
And, he says, look at the concessions the Lib Dems have won. Such as? "Civil liberties, and low earners lifted out of income tax." But it only gives low earners £170 a year, peanuts compared with the £18bn lost from all benefits: childcare cuts alone cost families £780 a year. He says he'll vote against the 10% cut in housing benefit for the unemployed but "under universal credit, the whole benefits system will be stronger" – and £18bn poorer. "Neither Labour nor Tories reduced poverty, but the coalition will," he said. Not so, says the Institute For Fiscal Studies: coalition plans mean 400,000 more children in poverty.
As Bob Diamond of Barclays goes up before the treasury committee today, what happened to the coalition promise to curb bank bonuses? "The prime minister is signed up to a fixed multiple of pay from top to bottom" – but that's only in the public sector. "Let's see. The debate is beginning." Can he really believe that?
We go at it hammer and tongs, but I am mystified. Why concede cuts that wreak social destruction that will take generations to undo? Why be party to creating a social deficit far more expensive for future generations than the fiscal deficit? Even if "UK plc" pays off its immediate debts, Cameron says there will be no increase in public spending. This is it, permanent austerity with social division that can only worsen year by year. "Labour would have made deep cuts too," says Hughes. Yes, and probably more than I would support – and yet still only half as much. That is a big difference from a coalition offering a forever shrunken state where the weak are left to sink or swim, however successful the economy in future.
So why does he stick with it? Are there no cuts bad enough to make him and his erstwhile left-leaning colleagues walk away and damn the consequences? Not as yet.