I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.
Philip Pullman in a speech in opposition to the closure of almost half of Oxfordshire's public libraries
Although I often complain about the degree to which the state attempts to control our lives, I still believe there are some things that can best be done collectively and the Public Library service is one of them. Like him, I am what I am because of the Library service. The only reason I don't use it so much now is because it has been hammered for years to the point where my available branches are pretty useless in comparison to the libraries of my own youth.
I have no ideological commitment to the idea of such a service being provided by the local council, but at the moment I see no alternative. I definitely don't see any market based option. There might be if we really had free markets, but we don't. What we have is a heavily regulated economy where the regulation is for the benefit of big corporates. Unfortunately the history of the last 20 years of library provision in the UK suggests we probably won't be seeing any other usable option either.
