What a waste: The Arts Council and Community Libraries

Exhibit A: This piece of political toilet paper  produced by community/social enterprise organisation Locality for The Arts Council. ‘Community libraries: Learning from experience:  guiding principles for local authorities’ is a report on ‘community’ (i.e. ‘volunteer-run’) libraries, where unpaid volunteers replace paid, and/or professionally  qualified staff in running public libraries.

The report extols the virtues of using volunteers from the community to run public libraries, in the dispassionate, impartial way that only a Big Society-endorsing, social enterprise-trumpeting umbrella organisation can.

If you can stomach the repeated conflation of ‘community library’ (n.b. ALL public libraries are community libraries, being as they serve and involve the community), with ‘volunteer-run’ library, and the awe-struck wonder at all the amazing things that volunteers could do with libraries (n.b. all the things that librarians are, and have been, doing for decades), or if you’re in local government and want to, I don’t know, save a bit of spare change by robbing your residents of  free, life-enhancing, professionally run access to art, culture and enlightenment, then you’ll love this report.

‘Community libraries  volunteer-run libraries…do not necessarily need to provide exactly the same services that other public libraries in the area provide.’

If you’re in government, and driven by a poisonous mix of ideology and cynicism to strip every ounce of safety, joy and security away from anyone on under £80k a year by taking away their healthcare services, benefits and their entitlement to a well-run, well-stocked public library, then you’ll love this report.

‘Community libraries  volunteer-run libraries can be statutory’

If you can dress  ‘I don’t need a library because I’m well off and I don’t want to pay for other people to have them’ up in cuddly, ever-so-keen rhetoric about clubbing together, doing our bit, Blitz spirit or whatever your preferred metaphor for exploiting unpaid labour is, then you will love this report.

 ‘Where they are entirely staffed by volunteers…quite a number have made use of exploited enthusiasm amongst retired or part-time librarians as volunteers’

If, however, you love libraries, art, literature, culture, democracy,  equality of opportunity, social mobility, or if you’ve just one of those people who hasn’t sacrificed their humanity to the selfish, deadening rhetoric of Austerity Britain, then you’ll see the Arts Council report as the damaging, insidious, slow-action clusterf**kbomb it really is.

Volunteer-run libraries should not, and cannot, become part of statutory library provision. Librarians should not be an endangered species. Free access to culture via libraries should never be anything other than universal, professionally staffed, and guaranteed into a  perpetuity which services that rely on the goodwill of volunteers can never hope to match. And the Arts Council should hang its head in shame.

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