Zadie Smith gave a speech last night at a pub in Kensal Green, very close to the local library she hopes to defend. Public appearances from Smith are rare these days, and her most recent appearance is testament to her strength of feeling on the subject of library closures.
Smith delivered a robust defence of the value of public libraries. Books are a form of education, and education is one of the few effective methods of social mobility that this country has. Zadie Smith put this simply: “I know I would never have seen a single university carrel if I had not grown up living a 100 yards from the library in Willesden Green. Local libraries are gateways not only to other libraries, but to other lives.”
She continued:
It always has been and always will be very difficult to explain to people who have money what it means not to have money. “If education matters to you,” they ask, “and if libraries matter to you, then why wouldn’t you be willing to pay for them if they matter so much?” They’re the kind of people who believe that value can only be measured in money.
No doubt the government would like to deny this. So who, when Radio 4’s Today programme went looking for an official response, did the coalition send to do battle with the dangerous Zadie Smith? They sent Shaun Bailey, “ambassador for the ‘big society’ project”, and a former Conservative parliamentary candidate. As an unelected party member, he wasn’t a participant in the parliamentary debate held in January on library closures.
Bailey is a former security guard, and a man who puts things starkly. In an interview with the Telegraph last year, he said: “The key wickedness that the Government has perpetrated is the idea that government can pay for everything. If you continually give people things and ask for nothing back you rob them of their will. People have to be involved in their own redemption.”
To Bailey, Smith’s speech was not about library closures, community disintegration or the dissolution of social apparatus, but rather “about self-driven success”.
“The problem with this big massive state that she really enjoys,” Bailey said,”is that it actually hasn’t had any luck in imparting the notion of education to young people.”
What if Smith’s point, as the Today presenter Justin Webb pointed out, is not merely that we shouldn’t be closing libraries, but we should be encouraging people to use them? Bailey runs what looks like an excellent social charity, which aims to “break the cycle of poverty, crime, and ill-health in struggling communities, through people centered sustainable change”. Yet he didn’t see how libraries would help this aim.
Smith isworth quoting at length on “community”:
Community is a partnership between the government and the people, and it’s depressing to hear the language of community, the so-called “Big Society”, being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership, as it attempts to renege on the deal. What could be better than handing people back the power so they can build their own schools, their own libraries? Better to leave people to the already onerous tasks of building their lives, and paying their taxes. Leave the building of infrastructure to government, and the protection of public services to government, that being government’s mandate, and the only possible justification for its power.
Bailey had other ideas: “it isn’t the government that decide if your library stays open or not, it’s actually your local authority … that’s why this Big Society thing is important, because you are close to those people for an electoral point of view and have more sway over them. If you, as a group of people, want your opinions heard and that you have the right and the mechanism to go and do that so actually I don’t accept any of her points on that.”
Perhaps it’s more that he didn’t understand any of her points? Libraries are, currently, a public service. As Smith recounts: “Like many people without any money, we relied on our public services – not as a frippery, not as a pointless addition, not as an excuse for personal stagnation, but as a necessary gateway to better opportunities.”
Smith spoke yesterday for a reason, and it would be a shame if fleeting publicity were to be the only result. Many people have been fighting to save libraries for quite some time now — if you want to join them, or to check what your own council’s plans for libraries are, a good place to begin is here, where Ian Anstice, a public librarian, has created a site that is the most up-to-date mine of information on the web. From there, you could visit Voices for the Library, and add your voice to theirs.
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