Over the past decade, Britain’s municipal authorities have closed hundreds of branch libraries. In response to plans to shut ten of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries, the playwright Lee Hall recalled the efforts of workingmen and -women to fight for those same libraries, and “for the right to read and grow intellectually, culturally and socially.” It is a heritage that took decades and decades to come to fruition but will be wiped out in a moment. You are not only about to make philistines of yourselves, but philistines of us all.
