Editorial

Herefordshire features a couple of times tonight. It could well feature many times in the future as well as what is being proposed there might make the already parched library landscape even more bleak. The council there is proposing just one funded library for the whole widespread county (population: 183,000, 842 square miles) with volunteers taking up the slack.  Moreover, it transpires today that even the one surviving council library, in Hereford, may well be partially taken over as a “hub” for “services for independent living”. As far as seeing how far the statutory aspect of providing library services goes, that’s really taking the biscuit, not that Ed Vaizey would ever intervene. Interestingly, the chief of Arts Council England is making a trip there on Friday to underline the importance of the Arts (ooh, and libraries – ACE always makes sure to add that last word at the end of descriptions of what it does).  One hopes that he’ll find the time to mention that stripping the county of libraries may be seen as a tad bit, well, horrendous.

Horrendous because, as the Libraries Change Lives award nominations show, libraries are not just nice things to have around.  They are refuges, free colleges, life improvers and life-turn-arounders. And cutting them out of ignorance will just increase that ignorance.  And blaming councils for it, as Michael Rosen has pointed out today, is a Government deception that many more are beginning to see through.

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