 Here is another interesting piece of analysis from B-BBC contributor Alan with which it is hard to argue!
“It is a fact that government cuts are forcing local authorities to close libraries. We know this because the BBC tells us so. It is just one of the remorseless attacks on the poor and vulnerable in society that this government’s savage cuts inflict upon us….leading inevitably to social breakdown, lack of opportunity, lack of social mobility, all combining to produce a level of frustration and fury amongst the disposessed that their only outlet for political dialogue is rioting and looting….a political statement of despair and rage at being abandoned on the scrapheap of life as bankers loot the country and pay themselves massive bonuses.
However looking at the annual accounts of a council such as Brent in London, which is closing libraries, a curious picture arises.
Here we have the budget requirements for the years 2004-2011: 2004/05 £347,415,000 I am no accountant nor an expert in local government finance but it would seem to me that in 2006, under Labour, Brent ‘s budget dropped enormously….but there was no talk of library closures then.And it looks that since then its budget has been growing again….could it be that the library closures are politically motivated….puts a new perspective on the comrades in City Hall…..prepared to sacrifice the citizens for political advantage. The question is….if libraries were kept open throughout the years of depression and recession in decades previous how is it that they cannot be kept open now…just what has the council been spending its money on? Why hasn’t the BBC asked that obvious question?
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LESS IS MORE!
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I think it is a big ask to expect the BBC to critically engage with anything. They work on the blank sheet principle.
In front of them is a blank sheet which they have to fill each day. They do this by looking around for Anti-Tory material, or material that they can spin as anti-Tory, and then fill up the sheet with the usual claims, interviews with the usual people, arriving at the usual conclusions.
They then send it off to the producer in the hope that it will pass the BBC “attack the Tories” editorial guidelines.
At no point does anybody critically engage with the material. We could all become BBC reporters because every single Biased BBC reader (including Dez) knows the narrative off by heart. These days it is so Pro-Labour it is almost funny.
At least it would be funny if it was not such an attack upon our democracy.
My expectation would be that Brent, like many other local authorities, will have signed up to the full range of PFI financed vanity projects, in the belief that the economy would grow and grow under Gordon Brown/Ed Balls tractor plans, and the growth would cover their PFI payments.
Now they’ll have the spending on their own town halls, swimming pools, etc. locked in to 25 years deals and the only scope for reducing expenditure is cutting vulnerable outposts like the poor bloody libraries.
Winston Smith in 1984 had a full time job erasing inconvenient facts from the past. Now we have the BBC.
I’m sure all those libraries were consuming too much energy anyway, and Brent council is spending £500K on schemes to reduce their energy consumption. Priorities are key.
Lionel Shriver on “Loose Ends” tonight was banging on about this assumed “attack” on the library service-and is to leave her money to Belfast library when she dies(got no kids, you see!)
When Blair was turning our libraries into chill zones, housing benefit offices with an ace computer and books in Urdu…and getting named after murdered black kids…I don`t recall the likes of Lionel, Bennett and Donaldson worrying unduly about the removal of books and any talk of “educational purpose” being attacked>
That only seems to count if the word Tory is somewhere in the story!
Imagine they lack self-awareness to konw how hypocritical and vainglorious these leftie liberals now look!
Ex-Ken Livingstone’s Brent is London’s answer to Hatton’s Liverpool, only in colour. The bit I grew up in is now twinned with Calcutta. Why they need a library is beyond me. Perhaps its all the left-wing writers that need there to be a libraries, in the hope someone somewhere will read their books.
The evil Tory cuts have been blamed for lots of things but this takes the biscuit:
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/weird-news/2012/02/03/spending-cuts-could-lead-to-incest-claims-councillor-in-borders-86908-23733113/
I wonder how closely related the councillor’s parents were.
Do I hear duelling banjos up there in Selkirk…..
The BBC meme is ‘Ask not what you can do for your country rather ask why the state is not spending enough on something, anything.’
It will be ever thus with the Statist Broadcasting Corporation.
Libraries are outdated. I appologise if I am sounding Blairite, in their original incarnation as a book lending and referance service they are outdated both because the majority of the class that would most benefit from them will not use them much even if the new trendy teaching methods have by chance imparted a modest level of literacy. And because those that would use them have alternave sources of information, and even of literature. A e-reader can be bought for less than many of the underclasses would spend on booze fags and drugs in a week with many books available free.
As a glorified computer room they are equally outdated. Most kids have a computer at home and many have a more powerful computer in a pocket.b b The best use would be a place to teach young children to read and write, Though the schools would be an even better place if the teaching establishment and unions could be persuaded.
Claire Tomalin is correct in saying that todays children couldn`t manage to read Dickens in their locally library-even if the library was open 24 hours a day with free coffee.
Much of this argument is therefore irrelevant. I`m guessing that the sentimental left liberal elites like to see a redbrick library as they walk past-but don`t care if there`s only rioting brats who`ve not got to the top of the housing queue inside it!
As long as they`ve all got jobs before early state-plumped pensions are due…and then the library service will have served its purpose-to look good, but decay with their supreme indifference!
Not much reporting on THIS side of the debate is there?
As the poor vote Labour, it is in the interest of the left to make or keep people poor, as well as importing poverty through mass immigration. Because of left wing progressive education, people in these inner city Labour areas cant read the books in the Libraries. The only people today who go to a library in an inner city area to borrow a book are the elderly or someone from outside of the area. The only books in my local library that you cannot find to buy cheaply on the internet are fifty to a hundred years old. The modern books chosen are no different from books in a charity shop. The factual books are now hardly used because of Wikipedia. And the only controversial books allowed are the unreadable left wing books no one with intelligence reads, that qualify for the Booker prize. Also the library buys, without exception, every single book published with a picture of a black person on the front cover.