There’s so much wrong with your statement that it’s almost hard to know where to start. “Free schools” and “free hospitals” were charitable – if someone didn’t feel charitable, you stayed uneducated or died. We also already pay for libraries in tax, so why should they go to charity where only those in wealthy areas would get the benefit? And there’d be no way to plan. And libraries cost £1 billion per year. Comic Relief Day raises barely a tenth of that.

Libraries play a vital and important role for many many people – the ones you don’t see in charity benefit galas. We see many students, many children, many everyone – the sort who need quiet places to study, free PCs and picture books and don’t have the money to pay for them themselves. That’s the point, you see, libraries are there as equalisers, providing the resources so everyone has access to information, reading and a chance to better themselves.

Citizen’s earnings help public libraries in order to help themselves. Many people rely on libraries for jobseeking, for social welfare, for education, for literacy. If you don’t spend it on libraries, you’re going spend it on higher fencing and security guards. Your choice, I guess, Ben.

The truth is that the world has changed dramatically in the last decade and libraries are no longer playing an important role for most people. The internet is widely available, along with free college courses. All education establishments have a library. This means that the people who most desperately need technical textbooks, as opposed to what is available on the internet, already have access.

I realise that it is nice to think that you can pop up the road and fetch out a book. However, there comes a point where the few benefits no longer support a policy of forcefully taking a citizen’s earnings to prop up an dying institution. That money would be better placed in the pockets of the people who earned it. They could then reinvest it in the economy, or maybe even in their own education.

Eric from Long Island, USA. (I’m pro-Library, everywhere!)

I recently met a young Apprentice who had not previously been a regular library user, but who found that vital text books, which he could not afford to buy, and without which he could not complete his apprenticeship, were available via his Public Library. That is just one individual who, having never previously given much thought to the matter, now recognises the vital nature of our Library system.

This vital self-educational nature of our Libraries should not be allowed to be forgotten.

Fantastic article. I think I’ll have to memorise every rebuttal to deploy in emphatic fashion when facing the familiar anti-library arguments!

If a library has 40,000 books at an average retail price of £9, a parent would need to spend £360,000 to supply their child with an equivalent collection.