- Local authorities suggest that local communities on the whole are happy to do this.
- It feels as if local authorities are using emotional blackmail against communities.
This is Gloucestershire: Gloucester MP’s library claims dismissed as books nailed to a cross
Doncaster Free Press: Mayor apologises as Doncaster’s Cabinet approves library cuts (4th Feb, 2011)
“There are so many reasons for keeping a library open and no reason at all for closing one.
Gazette Series: Berkeley community set to take on threatened library (5th May, 2011)
Daily Echo: County council given ‘red alert’ over failing projects (5th May, 2011)
This is Gloucestershire: Mark Hawthorne: Library closures show how hard times are (16th Feb, 2011)
Cambridge News: £36,000 to keep library safe (12th May, 2011)
If enough volunteers are not found to run these services they face closure.”
Buckinghamshire Advertiser: Chief calls on communities to save libraries (11th April, 2011)
Judging by the responses from local communities, people are not in favour of running their own libraries, but, as they are in favour of keeping the public libraries in their communities, they feel that they have to run them or run the risk of losing them.
Emotionally blackmailing people into running a library service in this way, because the local authority no longer wishes to continue providing the service, is wrong and morally questionable.
We also have to raise the question that, if the local community can see the value of having a local public library so much that they are prepared to volunteer to help run it, then why can’t councils see the value in keeping that library open and continue to fund it themselves with trained staff?
The selfish and self-serving politicians who are inpower at the moment are not the slightest bit interested in what the majority of people think or want. They are set on an ideological path for which they really do not have a mandate – and they know it. That’s why the so-called public consultations are nothing more than a cynical charade.