The quiet radicalism of the public library

Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not saying that the people making these decisions are stupid, or malicious, or that they do not care. Most of them care a great deal. That is precisely what makes the outcome so frustrating.

The problem is not a lack of ideas. Anybody who has spent 10 minutes in the sector can reel off a dozen things that would help. The problem is a lack of nerve, and a political culture that punishes people for trying something and rewards them for saying nothing at all.

We have built a system that is very good at explaining why nothing can be done, and very bad at doing anything

Consider the numbers for a moment. Not the ones you see in the headlines, which are chosen for their drama, but the boring ones underneath: the slow, grinding trends that have been moving in one direction for 20 years while everyone argued about something else.

I spoke last week to a woman who has been dealing with this for most of her adult life. She was not angry, which surprised me. She was tired. "I stopped expecting anyone to fix it," she told me. "Now I just want them to stop pretending they are going to."

The alternative

None of this is inevitable. Other countries have faced the same choices and made different ones, not always successfully, but at least with the honesty to admit that a choice was being made. That honesty is what we are missing.

So here is a modest proposal. Instead of another review, another consultation, another carefully worded statement that commits to nothing, let us try something. Let it be small. Let it be imperfect. But let it be real, and let us be honest about what happens when we try.