Cut One and We All Bleed
Library closures are politically unpopular in any area as the general public tend to see such measures as hugely regressive step. Any Sheffield Councillors who were any doubt of the strength of feeling against library closures will no doubt have been convinced after the public reaction to the proposed closure of the children’s library at Hillsborough. Its also hard to make such cuts on the quiet as people tend to notice if the the local library has been closed. Other attacks, however, such as the proposed £350m cuts to the legal aid bill announced by Kenneth Clarke can sneak in under the radar. According to Clarke “It cannot be right that the taxpayer is footing the bill for unnecessary court cases which would never have even reached the courtroom door, were it not for the fact that somebody else was paying.” In particular the Conservatives have focused upon costly divorce proceedings that could have been resolved by other, presumably much less costly, means. Yet in the same article it is revealed that legal aid will not continue for Employment, Welfare and Immigration cases, a fact less likely to be trumpeted by the Justice Secretary. Even as Manchester City Council announced that it was to loose 17% of its workforce, the government attempted to maintain the illusion that the cuts were ‘firm but fair.’ Yet the very same government spokesperson revealed their contempt for public sector workers by helpfully hinting how they thought the cuts could be enforced. “If councils share back-office services, join forces to procure, cut out the non-jobs and root out the over-spends, then they can protect frontline services.” While it’s heartening in one respect that the government feels the need to hide the true nature of their ‘firm but fair’ cuts behind half truths and ‘non-job’ myths for fear of public opinion, it’s important that library campaigners are not fooled by such rhetorical nonsense and recognise that public sector cuts affect us all. Just this week the PCS union has announced that many of its members working for Jobcentre Plus in Sheffield will be out on strike to protest against the fact they have progressively seen their contact with job-seekers limited to phone and internet interactions as they have been moved to call centres in the name of cost effectiveness. Again the most vulnerable will see a very real reduction in the quality of their service. And while the press attempt to characterise this as a dispute over ‘working conditions’ anyone who works in libraries will have come across job-seekers who have been failed by the current system, desperately seeking assistance as they attempt to fathom this brave new world of internet only application forms. What we are faced with is a debate on a national level against a small but powerful group of free-market fundamentalists who are seeking to privatise and dismantle the entire welfare state. So whilst we should of course be focusing our attention on our local library services, we must not loose sight of the wider context of public sector cuts. We must join up with other library and public sector campaigns across the country in order to win this argument.
