The closure of 127 public libraries did not get much attention amid the turmoil of 2018, but that does not make it a small story. The loss was felt by users of the culled services and those who worked in them. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, local authority spending on libraries fell by £30m to £741m over the past year.
That is a tiny fraction of public spending. The NHS budget for England last year was £124.7bn and, while libraries matter, it is hard to argue that they matter more than life-saving operations. Yet they also matter in ways that are harder to measure, and their loss tells a more profound story of national malaise. Partly it is a story of austerity, but it does not start there. The loss of facilities behind the frontline of public service is part of a protracted hollowing out of the public realm that increasingly makes itself felt in the decay of nationwide political solidarity.
Population imbalances
A library gives meaning to an area beyond measurable economic utility and its closure provokes feelings of communal redundancy. It is an affront to civic pride. A place without its library is less of a place, just as a high street without a post office is a lesser high street and a town without its own hospital is less of a town. Over time, the withdrawal of services accelerates regional disparities and erects cultural barriers between small and large conurbations. Some towns are protected by proximity to hub cities. Those that are not experience the alienation that is often described as feeling “left behind”. The term is too often used to mean inability – or unwillingness – to participate in the modern globalised era, with the implication of reactionary social attitudes. It is used to conjure an image of benighted former industrial centres where underskilled older white Britons rail impotently against progress. That caricature is too simple and too fatalistic. It casts people as victims of history who need compensation but cannot otherwise be helped, which is patronising and ineffective. More proactive rehabilitation is required.
Research by the Centre for Towns (CfT), a thinktank, finds people in small towns more likely than city dwellers to feel that their area is less well off than others and more neglected by politics. Small towns also suffer from population imbalances. Between 1981 and 2011, UK towns and villages studied by the CfT lost over a million people under the age of 25, and gained 2 million over-65s. By contrast, major cities gained over 300,000 under-25s and lost around 200,000 over-65s. That shift has economic and political consequences. The 2017 general election was marked by a national swing from Conservative to Labour, but many small towns, places such as Wigan and Mansfield, defied the trend.
Meanwhile, older populations feel more pressure from shortfalls in social care costs and NHS spending. On the last day that parliament sat this year, the government let slip that public health budgets for local authorities will be slashed by £85m next year. Ambitious youth flees to the big city, while those who stay are made to feel like failures. That dynamic plays out in areas that have already weathered decades of ideological inclemency, starting with the laissez-faire approach of the 1980s that treated decline as a correction imposed by the market on places with obsolescent economic capacity – colliery towns, for example. New Labour brought higher spending to palliate the effects of Thatcherism, but that looked more like managed decline than a strategy to reverse it. Then, after 2010, came the ravages of austerity. Now there is the threat of a fourth cruel chapter written by new technology: online shopping squeezing high street margins, turning town centres ever more ghostly.
None of this was or is inevitable. It has been convenient for policymakers to treat globalisation as an irresistible force of nature, but whether powerful forces do good or ill depends on how they are handled. Defences can be built against storms; strong winds can turn turbines.
Rebuild solidarity
The essential change that must happen is recognition that place, identity and politics are linked in potent ways at a level well below the nation state. The grievances that express themselves in national politics are generated by corrosion of regional and municipal self-confidence. The way to rebuild solidarity and heal wounds opened by the referendum is to rehabilitate people’s belief that the place they live matters, that it is respected as integral to the fabric of the nation. That requires a conceptual shift in the allocation of resources and a less utilitarian view of what local services provide. Counting footfall in a small library or village post office is a poor measure of its value and so underestimates the cost of a closure.
In 1946, in the smouldering ruins of Europe after the second world war, the Arts Council quoted its founding chair, John Maynard Keynes, who had said: “The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied … by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations”. Keynes understood that policies of tax-and-spend are not ends in themselves but means to achieve greater political goals. Protecting the character of towns and villages is one such goal.
National destiny
There are economic benefits that flow from protecting local services, keeping struggling communities afloat, but the greater gain is in political stability. Allowing places to feel “left behind” has incubated disaffection with the institutions that uphold British democracy, above all parliament. It is in the interests of citizens in thriving areas to subsidise less economically self-sufficient parts of the country. And no one should be squeamish about calling it subsidy. National political units are held together by shared identity, which in practice requires consensual transfer of wealth and resources from rich to poor. Such redistribution is legitimised by a sense of common national destiny and also reinforces that solidarity. That is true of subsidy between regions as well as individuals.
The call for national unity and the wish that social divisions would heal is common enough in politics, although often it is a veiled demand by ideologues of left and right that their view be allowed to prevail – unity by the extinction of dissent. But there is no route to solidarity by enforcing uniform political thinking. The better way is by valuing diversity and plurality, not just of opinion but of the areas that shape the way people think. That means investing in small things that make a big difference to small places – starting with the library.
• This article was amended on 31 December 2018 to remove a reference to the city of Wakefield in a statement about towns; and to clarify that Keynes was quoted in 1946 by the Arts Council using a citation he had written in earlier years.
