Libraries are not just about borrowing books – though that is obviously a fine and useful part. They are clearly a motor for positive change. They are about opportunity, about discovery, about being in a place where a new thought is always possible. Like so much in life, so many of our generation (those over 40) benefitted from a huge network of helpful social apparatus that provided life chances and changes our grandparents and parents did not enjoy. Free third level education and masses of libraries and mobile libraries are just a couple of them.
Libraries had librarians. They might get to know you as you made your weekly trip, see the books you were drawn to, suggest others, help nudge you into a world of wonder. Obviously, all knowledge is in our pockets now, but it is not curated in a way that can shift us in powerful new directions and have our brains glow gloriously like a comet in flight.
And to be in books is to be elsewhere. I grew up in a house where books were not the norm – my parents are working-class non-professionals and had never been keen readers, though there was a collection of encyclopaedias, paid off over time from some club they found. Libraries provided a teeming bounty. My mother saw the value in taking us all to libraries and helping us move up. This is far from a unique story. Now, around one million children in Britian do not have a book in their home. And the opportunity for them to walk right off the street and find one is shuttering.
Beyond the books, libraries remain places of coming together. In a time of fracturing, libraries are for and of their communities, for clubs, whether for young parents and their children or language classes or mental health support, or other health advice and signposting; they’re for older people looking, perhaps, for ideas for things to keep being active in the world, or for homeless people just needing somewhere to sit. Free, comfortable public spaces are at a premium. They are increasingly viewed as a resource to be paid for by users rather than an essential civic imperative.
It goes beyond all this too, right to the heart of what we value. During the period of power of the last government, there was a sneering at knowledge and experts, an anti-intellectualism that implied something suspect in wanting to know things and challenge things and not simply want to be in hock to commerce. It suggested the woolly middle-class were interested in these things, not salt-of-the-earth types. It was cynical and it has led us to where we sit.
If Keir Starmer wanted to push back against the grey cloud that has descended because of his doom-laden warnings, he could seek to make libraries hubs of positivity and growth. The network is there. But maybe not for long. Once the libraries go, they’re gone.
Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on Twitter.
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