If the government thought that no one would fuss over a few library closures, they were wrong. Since the disclosure that local authority budget cuts mean that nearly 400 libraries are under threat, rumbles of discontent have been growing.
The latest heavyweight to join the debate is Philip Pullman, who spoke at a local meeting in Oxfordshire on 20 January. His passionate and powerful speech — which is well worth reading full here — contains one of the best critiques of the “big society” that I’ve seen. Talking about the widespread plans to allow communities to “bid” to get back withdrawn funding for public services from a central pot, he says:
Imagine two communities that have been told their local library is going to be closed. One of them is full of people with generous pension arrangements, plenty of time on their hands, lots of experience of negotiating planning applications and that sort of thing, broadband connections to every household, two cars in every drive, neighbourhood watch schemes in every road, all organised and ready to go. Now, I like people like that. They are the backbone of many communities. I approve of them and of their desire to do something for their villages or towns. I’m not knocking them.
But they do have certain advantages that the other community, the second one I’m talking about, does not. There, people are out of work, there are a lot of single parent households, young mothers struggling to look after their toddlers and, as for broadband and two cars, they might have a slow, old computer if they’re lucky and a beaten-up old van and they dread the MOT test — people for whom a trip to the centre of Oxford takes a lot of time to organise, a lot of energy to negotiate, getting the children into something warm, getting the buggy set up and the baby stuff all organised, and the bus isn’t free, either — you can imagine it. Which of those two communities will get a bid organised to fund their local library?
. . .
Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.
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It is, as the comedian Robin Ince wrote in the New Statesman last week, time for a “quiet rebellion” over libraries. As he puts it, “You might not belong to your library now, but, one day, when you walk by a building site promising luxury apartments, where kids on tricycles once excitedly wheeled back with their new favourite book on dinosaurs, you will be sorry that it is gone.”
You can see a regularly updated map of which libraries are threatened with closure here.
The hash-tag to follow the latest developments on Twitter is #savelibraries.
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