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The CP Advisory bringing together workers in housing and tenants activists recently met in Abu Dhabi.
CP School
In July the CP is co sponsoring a Festival of 21st Century Marxism.
Call for Support
Communists in Balham are asking for support for local leafletting 6pm tube station on 21st.
08 October 2011
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Oxfordshire Communists played an active part in the campaign to thwart the Council’s plans to shut many of Oxfordshire’s public libraries. You can read here, detailed proposals and a campaign strategy outlined by the local CP.
Naturally we welcomed the County Council’s retreat and in this one respect we welcome the County Council’s new proposals: that they claim to keep open every one of Oxfordshire’s 43 public libraries.
But we are clear the County Council has not really listened to the people of Oxfordshire. The library cuts have not been abandoned or even reduced: they have simply been repackaged.
The County Council itself acknowledges the three things the public values most about libraries are the quality of: the stock, the buildings and the staff.
The new consultation paper tells us nothing about any of these things. It only tells us all the 43 existing libraries are expected to stay open. To achieve the cuts we must therefore assume the County Council wants to run down all of these three in the belief that no one will notice and complain so long as no library actually shuts.
The plain fact is the County Council has a duty under the 1964 Wilson Government’s Public Libraries and Museums Act to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service.
In its consultation paper the County Council repeats the expression “comprehensive and efficient library service” as if repeating this phrase is supposed to deceive the reader that the proposals actually meet the County Council’s legal obligations.
The County Council admits that the 1964 Act outlines four key areas that a comprehensive library service must deliver:
Securing and keeping a wide range of free resources, including books and other printed matter, sound recordings, films and other materials, to browse and borrow in sufficient number, range and quality
Meet the general requirements (and any special requirements) of both adults and children living, working or studying in the local area
Free independent information and advice
Encouraging the use and participation of the service, for example, through clear and easy ways to join, access, shape and influence the service.
The County Council then states that the Act does not say exactly what is to be meant by any of these requirements and proceeds almost completely to ignore them in the rest of its paper.
We suspect the County Council’s proposals may put it on the wrong side of the law but the paper never tells us what the County Council thinks would represent a comprehensive and efficient library service for Oxfordshire, nor does it tell us what kind of library service it plans to give us: it merely tells us some kind of service will be available from all the 43 existing buildings.
By no stretch of the imagination is this a meaningful consultation on “a future library service for Oxfordshire” as the County Council claims.