Library closures: not just a cause for 'luvvies', Eric Pickles

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/library-closures-luvvies-eric-pickles

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In a House of Commons debate on Monday, Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, responded to the Labour MP Tristram Hunt's criticism that the government managed to find £250m to "empty the bins more regularly" by saying:

<blockquote>"The people who are putting dustbins above [other] things are people who care about the general service provided to the electorate. The honourable gentleman is a bit of a luvvie, so no doubt he is looking intensely at the drop in culture, but that is a matter for local decision, and he is wholly wrong … Frankly, he is just lining up a bunch of luvvies. He should listen a little bit more."</blockquote>

I first joined Manor Park Library in the London Borough of Newham in the mid-1980s, and I have been an avid user of libraries ever since; two and a half decades later, I still visit on at least a weekly basis. But then I am lucky: I live in Hackney in east London, and in addition to my borough's numerous libraries and already excellent selection, I have access to the libraries of 14 other local authorities, thanks to the London Libraries Consortium. So it was distressing to find out that in the last year alone, more than 200 libraries were closed in the UK. Hunt is a historian with more than a little telly and radio experience, but while the cause of protesting against library closures has attracted a glitzier-than-normal set of supporters, who libraries provide for is not restricted to luvvies.

Back in 2010, Michael Gove, the education secretary, spoke of a "yawning gap" between the attainment levels of children from wildly different socioeconomic circumstances, saying: "Rich, thick kids do better than poor, clever children before they go to school." I am not and was not rich, but I did grow up in a home with an established reading culture, even if we didn't own many books. Books are not cheap. Much more than the written word, libraries provide a necessary space – for free – in which poorer children are able to access some of the very tools that they need in order to catch up with their more privileged peers – a dedicated building offering everything from a warm, devoted space where people can study, to broadband internet access and movie clubs.

I spent much of my late teens in Stratford Library on Water Lane, east London, reading books in damp corners, but also using the computers and trying to create my "room of one's own", something I was unable to do with three siblings at home in our flat. At university, our two campus libraries went one step further and provided me with an income, when I worked as a shelver.

I am not a luvvie, and the vast majority of people who use their local libraries aren't either. They are there because of the absolutely necessary services that libraries deliver.

There is a discrepancy in the ideas the government espouses and the actions it is taking. It betrays a way of thinking that is not terribly joined up – if you acknowledge, however begrudgingly, that things are unequal, but then allow steps that seek actively to maintain that unfair status quo, you cannot claim to be "all in this together". How to do we address this "yawning gap" Gove mentioned? I doubt it is by reducing the opportunities to gain access to the supplementary and support work that libraries provide.

Two years ago, Pickles said: "Before we see libraries cut … I want to see councils merge their back office functions … And when they have done all that, if they feel they have to close libraries, they should talk to me again."

We are talking to you again, Mr Pickles. Maybe you should listen more.