Don't Privatise Our Libraries

Over on Comment Is Free, for which we all know that he does not write (because certain people turn up in the comments to say so every time that he writes for it), Neil Clark writes:

"Save our libraries" has been one of the slogans of 2011, as local residents fight to preserve much-loved community assets against the government's cutbacks. But there's another threat hanging over Britain's public library service: that of privatisation. The idea of privatised libraries would have been unthinkable in the mixed economy and genuinely progressive 1960s and 70s, but it shows how far down the road marked "neo-liberal extremism" we have travelled since 1979, that they're now very much on the agenda.

The first local authority to contract out its library service was Tory-controlled Hounslow in 2008, which outsourced its libraries to John Laing Integrated Services, granting the firm a 15-year contract. Despite jobs and services suffering since then more authorities could be about to follow suit. In Oxfordshire, council leader Keith Mitchell, who last December announced that the council planned to cease funding for almost half of the county's libraries, has described talks with US firm Library Systems and Service (LSSI) as "positive".

In Suffolk, where last year the Tory council announced it would be outsourcing nearly all of its services, Judy Terry, the county councillor responsible for libraries, has said that officials also plan to hold meetings with representatives from LSSI and "another organisation that has been in touch". In Richmond upon Thames, libraries are also under threat of privatisation, while in Bury, the Tory council seems keen to hive off all of its functions, including libraries, to the private sector and become, like Suffolk, merely an "enabling council". "If you look back to Margaret Thatcher, it was always envisaged that councils would become enablers," says council leader Bob Bibby.

The concept of privately run, non-local authority libraries is also being enthusiastically promoted by free-market think-tanks and commentators. The Adam Smith Institute's director Eamonn Butler, a man who didn't think the coalition's plans to flog off England's publicly owned forests went far enough, looks back nostalgically to those halcyon days when "philanthropic foundations" and "private shops like Boots would lend books out to the public for a few pence". Butler believes that the "huge footprint" of publicly owned libraries "simply crowds out private and voluntary alternatives".

In the Daily Telegraph, Tory MEP Daniel Hannan asks: "Why should the libraries be state-run? Doesn't our civilisation equally reside on the bookshelves in our homes?" It doesn't seem to occur to Hannan that many people have few books at home because they can't afford to buy them, and that a public lending library is the only way they can enjoy the pleasure of reading. The case against privatising libraries is not just based on concerns over the track record of private companies, but also on the way that privatisation would change the whole ethos of our library service. Libraries should be run as a not-for-profit public service. That can't happen if they're run by private companies. We should oppose privatised libraries for the same reasons we oppose a privatised NHS.

Just over 30 years since it was introduced in Britain, privatisation has been widely discredited. Our privatised railways are by far the most expensive in Europe. Our utilities have become notorious for ripping off the public, hiking up prices quickly when wholesale prices rise, but being less quick to cut prices when they fall. The assertion that things which are privatised work best would be laughed at by anyone who has experienced travelling on Britain's overcrowded and ludicrously expensive privatised trains and the comfortable and affordable state-run trains on mainland Europe.

David Cameron's "big society" is nothing more than a smokescreen for the wholescale privatisation of the public sector. It's about empowering – and enriching – private companies, not individuals or communities, who are better served if local services, such as libraries, stay in local authority hands. The fight to save libraries is therefore not just about opposing cultural vandalism. It's about halting the encroachment of profit-hungry private companies into every aspect of our lives. It's time to exorcise what the author Philip Pullman calls "the greedy ghost" of market fundamentalism once and for all.