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Why we can’t afford to cut our libraries

A recent meeting to discuss the council’s proposals to close 20 out of its 43 libraries saw an impressive turn-out. About 300 people: ranging from students to workers; librarians to library users; the elderly to the very young, gathered in Oxford Town Hall to express their concern. No doubt the kids were mostly there to see Philip Pullman, the most eminent of the four speakers, but nonetheless it says something about the broad public appreciation of libraries. It is not only librarians who will suffer from the planned closures.

Everyone had stories to share about why libraries mattered to them. Librarians told of school children who had neither internet nor a quiet place to work at home, and of eighty year-olds for whom a library might provide the only human contact that day.A lecturer spoke of how his library had inspired him to become the first member of his family to go to university, and of his disabled son, for whom the library was vital. One campaigner read out a statement from a working mother who had spoken little English when she moved here, and found her library one of the only places where she felt warm, safe and welcomed.

Sure, these stories are sentimental, but they are also true. What sort of message do we send to all these people if we take libraries away from them?

The best storyteller was, of course, Philip Pullman. He began with an epic tale of the destruction of libraries in Alexandria, before recalling his own delight as a child in becoming a ‘citizen of the great republic of reading’ at his local library in Battersea. He mocked the government’s plan to put libraries in the hands of volunteers instead of local authorities, joking that Cameron’s ‘big society’ must indeed be big to contain all these volunteers with so much free time. He went on to challenge the wider government cuts, declaring our society haunted by the ‘greedy ghosts’ of capitalism, although he added lightly that ‘he didn’t blame Oxfordshire council for the whole degeneration of Western civilization’.

Whether or not you’re on Pullman’s side about cuts to public spending; whether you consider them a pragmatic necessity or entirely ideological, the assault on libraries seem pretty inexcusable. It is not only Oxfordshire libraries that are facing closure: across the country it is estimated that as many as 1 in 5 libraries are at risk, and in some areas- such as the Isle of Wight, where 9 out of 11 libraries have been earmarked for closure- figures are even more shocking. These cuts reveal just how empty statements such as ‘we’re all in it together’ are: the poor will undoubtedly be hit the hardest. The fact that the library in Blackbird Leys, one of Europe’s biggest housing estates, is set to close, while the library in David Cameron’s own constituency of Witney is safe, completely undermines the coalition’s pretences of fairness.

So what can we do to save our libraries? The strategy taken up by users of one Milton Keynes library- everyone withdrew their maximum allowance of books at once in order to convey the scale of the threat- is probably not the best one, though amusing. Oxfordshire residents were urged to write to their counsellors citing a breach of the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act, which requires library services to be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘improving’, to file a formal complaint at the council’s offices, and to join anti-cuts demonstrations in London. One speaker suggested that we calculate the cost to the government in providing bus passes for all those residents who, if the plans go ahead, will no longer be within walking- distance of a library. But then again, maybe they’ll just take away our bus passes.

Perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to share our stories about what our libraries have done for us; to tell our council, in the words of Philip Pullman, that “YOU don’t know the value of what you are looking after.”

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