Simon Montgomery: The Big Story, Playground of the Vanities: What next for our precious library?
First published in the Pevensey Bay Journal, edition 19, Saturday 14 July 2018, available in local newsagents
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The plan by this group is to have a ‘community hub’ and library. What exactly is happening with our precious library? East Sussex County Council has now acknowledged that this venture has been guaranteed with personal money.
As more questions emerge about claims made and plans promised, some fundamental points of alarm are now being raised by a significant number of people in Pevensey Bay. Amongst all the finery and flannel of their Facebook threads, are we witnessing a fairytale that is beginning to look familiar?
The Big Story, Playground of the Vanities: What next for our precious library?
Upwards of between 80 and 200 people in this community have been working to save our precious library over the last three years.
Many of these people are somewhat surprised to see a “Network Volunteers” group appear to take the praise as the people that have saved the library.
Four figures standing above the library on a balcony waving champagne bottles, photographed for the local press, has failed to convince many people in this community that what we are seeing is a salvation.
As a young lady put things to us at a recent meeting about this group, “everything they are doing is manipulation, why does someone not just answer them when they see what they say on Facebook?”
A business owner in Pevensey Bay told Bay Life, “I do not think that upwards of 60 to 80% of people here know what has really happened”.
East Sussex County Council has revealed that personal money has been pledged by two of the group that we see in the balcony scene.
As one local library lover suggested, “there may be nothing wrong at all in the fact that a significant sum of money has been pledged by two people in this group, I guess it could be argued that shows commitment, the problem is that the personal guarantee of this money also means that they have a vested interest in what they are doing”.
Bay Life is questioning of this group.
We question the basis on which this group has proceeded with claims made in relation to their proposal for the library.
Is the balcony scene the latest episode in a fairy tale?
Bay Life has openly supported the cause of the library, working alongside the local friends of the library group for the last three years.
We have supported the friends because, like all the other 800+ friends of library groups across the country, the campaigns date back to the principles of the Library movement founded in the Libraries Act of 1850.
This group in Pevensey Bay plan a ‘social hub and community library’. This is a non sequitur.
Alan Wylie, one of the most informed library campaigners in the country, tracks changes week by week with what is happening. He explains his view of social hubs in a very succinct way. He says “a library is a social hub”.
Over £330 million has been taken out of the library budgets in this country since 2010.
When the Government in 2016 announced a new literacy budget of £31.4 million, not a penny was allocated to the library movement.
Fears are growing in Pevensey Bay that without a core principle to fund a community library, what we are witnessing is a venture based on personal interest and vanity.
Devon County Council set up an independent staff- and community-owned social enterprise to run the county’s library service.
They said, “the idea for this ‘mutual’ delivery model emerged in 2014, when the council asked its communities to consider options to save £1.5 million. There was strong feedback that libraries played an important role in local communities and were highly valued. However, most people understood the financial pressures, and there was a willingness to explore other solutions.
“Following extensive consultation, the decision was made to establish an independent public service mutual.
“Libraries Unlimited became operational in 2016 and now runs Devon’s 50 community libraries and four mobile libraries.
“Its strategic direction is set by a board of trustees (staff, community and independent trustees) who all have a passion for the future of libraries along with the vision, expertise and creativity to help the organisation develop and grow.
“Libraries Unlimited is developing new relationships with partners at the local, national and international levels. Its network of Friends Groups has expanded from 14 to 44 in two years, providing local support, fundraising and input”.
We question whether this group in Pevensey Bay knows anything about the library movement in this country.
A notion links subscription libraries, travelling libraries, academic libraries that arrived with the birth of the Enlightenment, the launch of the public library movement in1850, through the book clubs of the 1930s, the post war technical and education boom that led to the Libraries Act of 1964 and the statutory duties of County Councils for the last fifty years.
That notion is enshrined in the 1850 Libraries Act,“the creation of an enduring national institution that provides universal free access to information and literature, indicative of the moral, social and educative concerns of the time”. New rural community libraries in the 21st century trace their origins back to this Act.
Everyone knows someone whose life has been transformed by a library book.
Germaine Greer sums up the experience of a library with the notion of unselfconsciousness.
“Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark… In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed”.
We do not believe this group is representative of the people of Pevensey Bay in any way.
This group announced that they intended to bid for the library, before the time had come to put bids on the table.
A demonstration organised by the local friends of library group in December 2017 saw a number of members of this group walking along the line of people asking for email addresses to support their own proposal.
What kind of people would consider doing something of that description?
There have been threats to Bay Life.
If we do not publish what this group wants to say they will make claim to Wealden Council that the publisher of Bay Life has brought this community into disrepute. Our publisher, Dianne Dear, has explained that she does not respond to threats.
We question the credibility of this group.
Are we witnessing a story that is as old as Hans Christian Andersen? A small boy at the end of his story about conceit and vanity, points his finger. The Emperor, he indicates, has got no clothes. In the final scene, the crowd start laughing.
Is now the time to ask many of the people who have worked so hard over the last three years to save the local library what they think?
What kind of number might we be talking about? 80 to 200 local people may be an underestimate.
That would include the estimated 60-80% of people in this community that the local business owner identified to us as being “probably unaware of what is happening”.
Pevensey Bay will get the library that so many people have worked so hard to found over the last three years, perhaps on a new site with a sea view.
Germaine Greer is at home in a library, unselfconscious. Unselfconsciousness is not self interest.
Vanity and manipulation are not the founding principles of a rural library that is part of the new mutuality movement of the 21st century.
Simon Montgomery
