I totally agree with Shirley CILIP and the SCL should have come out with a strong message that they would under no circumstances support the replacement of paid staff with volunteers and the replacement of a comprehensive and efficient statutory service with a network of fragmented ‘community libraries’

CILIP must, surely, have foreseen that removing the policy in 2010 would open the floodgates. With one’s enemy a short distance from the gates it was wrong to have deliberately left them ajar — making it well nigh impossible to close them against the forces pressing up upon their feebly-constructed barricades in 2012. The introduction of a two-tier, postcode lottery library service is now well under way. This would seem to have been materially assisted by CILIP and the SCL going down the route of, at best, pragmatism and, at worst, compromise and appeasement. Frontline and junior management jobs have been acknowledged as expendable, whilst those fortunate enough to have secure positions in senior posts will reign over a service that has been mutilated beyond recognition. The production of a “discussion document” of this nature implies that the de-professionalisation of the service is not anathema to CILIP, nor to the SCL, and that their defence of the library service cannot be described admirable or robust. Why is a non-member commenting in this manner ? Because the service people rely on is in crisis.