Appropriate Utilisation of Literary Resources

Perhaps the most salient difference between the present generation of Conservatives and its predecessors is that those of the present generation are, by definition and before everything else, vulgarians. After five years of gleeful kicking by the sniggering schoolboys of the Bullingdon Club, the small-minded curtain-twitchers of the Tin-pot Tessie régime have thrown a pittance at what remains of the country's libraries, accompanied by orders for the sector to mend its ways. According to the relevant flunkey, libraries are hugely popular and among our most valuable community assets, and must therefore be altered out of all recognition, rather like the National Health Service. It is absurd to expect libraries to deal in books alone; books are, after all, merely what they are set up to provide. To gain the approval of the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Jeffrey Archer, libraries must, in addition, provide access to all the other public services for which the Government is not prepared to pay, and convert themselves into job centres, health clinics and, no doubt, places of surveillance and migrant control. After all: a quiet place to read, in which units of book trade merchandise are shared rather than sold? Where's the rah-rah in that?