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I'm a fairly regular visitor to the Civil Justice Centre in Manchester, and it's so quiet it's positively spooky. One almost expects to see tumbleweed rolling along the corridors.

Yet it cost £160m, and thanks to the rip off lunacy of PFI that Gordon Brown was so keen to espouse it will carry on costing us for years to come.

It's an absolute disgrace that so many local courts are closing. The concept of providing justice to ordinary people has been completely abandoned, and this supposedly Conservative government is acting like a Stalinist oliigarchy. No wonder they're so keen to make our courts available for Russian mafia bosses to play their fraudulent games in - after all in goverment terms they're `people like us'.

It really is quite frightening how like 1984 we are becoming. The government removes the ability of its subjects to obtain justice, then says that as nobody is using the courts any more there is evidently no need for them so let's close them down. This is Newspeak writ large.