Sometimes a country, like a human being, feels under the weather, lacks the will to work, wonders how it is going to get through the day. It is a mood swing that can envelop towns or cities. It infects communities, and entire families from time to time. So when David Cameron yesterday launched his brave new plan to get the long-term unemployed off their feet and back into work, I wondered how it would go down in Easterhouse.

This is not just a rundown housing estate in Glasgow, it is the place where, in a sense, the whole idea began. On these mean streets, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, experienced what has come to be known as his “epiphany” - a conversion to compassionate Conservatism as an antidote to the hardnosed Thatcherite version. After touring the crumbling tenement flats and the rubbish-strewn closes that characterised the place in those days, he told the party's spring conference in 2002 that politics was “not about winning votes for the Conservative Party in places like Easterhouse. It's about being a party that doesn't just drive past Easterhouse on the motorway.”

Today, the Tory motorcade swings right into the heart of Easterhouse, bringing with it an idea to convert the hardcore unemployed in this and every other work-free zone in Britain by offering them the chance of finding work through community schemes, backed by the threat that if they fail to seize the oportunity, they may find their benefits stopped.

I cannot, in all honesty, report a universal “huzzah” from the good folk of Easterhouse, still emerging from their new year revels. Sandy Weddell, the Baptist minister who first showed Mr Duncan Smith around the estate, confessed that the atmosphere this week was a little “bedraggled”. Most people, he said, were feeling “dwamy” - a wonderful Scots word that means exactly what it sounds like: something between underwhelmed and oppressed. That is to say, the prospect of them welcoming a Wisconsin-style scheme to ease them off benefits were little better than so-so.

That is not to say that the idea is still-born. On the contrary, Mr Weddell conceded that some of those for whom the unemployed state has not only become ingrained, but has been passed down through two or three generations, would find the stick of a robust threat, such as loss of benefits, at least as important as the carrot of help in winning the skills and confidence that could eventually find them a proper job.

But what he and some of Glasgow's officials emphasise is that a single government scheme with all its centralised bureaucracy would never fit the many and varied issues that keep 100,000 people in Glasgow obstinately on the dole despite the widespread availability of jobs. “Every family is different, every case throws up a new set of circumstances,” he said. “You'd need a Plato-philosopher's government to meet every scenario.”

The same message, in different form, came from the councillors. Cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham or Newcastle, who have been in the front line in grappling with the social ills that stem from an antipathy to work, have experienced several ambitious schemes, not least ten years of the Labour Government's welfare-to-work programme - in the course of which they have acquired more first-hand knowledge about the attitudes and responses of the unemployed than any number of Tory think-tanks.

What Steven Purcell, Glasgow's pragmatic leader, urged was that the cities themselves should be given the ability to tailor any new scheme to the needs of their own citizens. “We need greater flexibility rather than a top-heavy new scheme,” he said, “You have to make the right investment in the right quality of work to gain any long-term benefits and finally get people out of the miserable lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed.”

Determining where and how that investment should be made was best done at local rather than national level. Far from dismissing Mr Cameron's approach, however, he thought it deserved proper consideration, with the proviso that it should be tailored to the needs of the city rather than the other way round.

Nothing in the Conservative policy contradicts this idea - indeed to devolve responsibility for administering it would be a very Tory approach. Every scheme that has been examined around the world, principally in Australia and America, has been tailored to local requirements, and been repeatedly modified through trial and error. Two ideas, however, have predominated: that actually experiencing work helps jobseekers to become more employable; and that continuing to draw benefits confers responsibilities on those who receive them.

The key to success, as every other country has found, lies in finding work that is both readily available, but also undemeaning. Simply assigning jobseekers the nearest bit of local drudgery - a park to be cleaned up, a graffiti-daubed wall to clean - is likely not only to bore them from the start, but also to alienate them from the very concept of work. As Mr Weddell pointed out, the days when it was a matter of pride to be a local park warden or a greenkeeper have largely gone.

What has not been entirely eliminated from the national bloodstream, however, is the notion of achievement - the completion of a decent job well done, the satisfaction of discovering that work can be enjoyable, the financial reward that recognises genuine effort. If, at the same time, it is of direct local benefit, then that is a bonus. It might even be enough to alter the mood of the community, however dwamy it may be feeling.

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