THIS IS A COLUMN ABOUT BOOKS, not politics, but when books are threatened by politics, there is good reason to speak out.

Gordon Brown’s decision to axe £7,000,000 from the British Library budget arrives at the same moment as Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, tells us why supercasinos are good for Britain. Presumably one reason being that it is too dark to read in such places, and God forbid that we should encourage solitary vices. The Government’s message is clear: a Las Vegas lifestyle is better than culture.

The Government has responded to criticism by pointing to its funding record for the arts, curiously not understanding that the British Library is not “the arts”; it is a cultural institution. Culture is not the icing on the cake, as most ministers seem to believe — it is the expression of a civilised society. New Labour has not been a civilising influence in Britain, perhaps because its ministers are well-meaning men and women who don’t actually believe in very much except for a vague notion of a fairer society, which seems to mean destroying anything that looks elitist. No doubt the Chancellor and his men wonder why they should fund a reading room that most people never visit. Supercasinos will be much more popular and, to be frank, casinos make more money than culture.

I was looking at photographs of polar bears stranded on the ice floes and I thought that soon everything I value will be cut off on smaller and smaller islands of survival. Our political climate is proving hostile to those things that are a little more austere, perhaps rather formal, a little less instantly relevant. The arts will never be Miami Beach and that is where our Prime Minister likes to holiday, with a Bee Gee.

I can (just) hear the arguments that not everyone wants opera or experimental theatre (myself, I do not want war, but I still have to pay for it), but I cannot accept any arguments that jeopardise a prime cultural resource that is in trust for the nation and must be passed on to future generations.

The British Library is a copyright library. If you want to find a book — any book — it is there. It is also the national newspaper archive, and it maintains a series of exhibitions and schools programmes. The cuts threaten both the permanent collection, which will be reduced by 15 per cent, and all exhibition and outreach programmes. Entry to the stacks will no longer be free.

National assets do not belong to governments. Margaret Thatcher never understood this, and neither do Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Arguments that the internet can do much of the BL’s work as an archive resource are rather like those arguments made for zoos versus the wild. For, paradoxically, in the catalogued, ordered, world of any library there is the strange serendipity of finding what you never thought you were looking for — of making a discovery out of the blue, of wandering where you will and turning up the connections that never, ever, appear on Google. There are vast open spaces in the tight confines of a library, just as there are new worlds in the pages of a book. Take this away, discourage users, lose it to a new generation, and you lose more than a library — you lose a way of life.

A way of life, I venture to say, that is worth preserving.

And this week I received a letter from a Times reader who at 87 has served in the Second World War and been writing poems ever since. His wife had read my column on the necessity of poetry and she wanted her husband to tell me about the place of poetry in their lives — not as a pastime, but as a daily resource. I read all this with interest and then came to the last sentence: “Suddenly last night my wife Ailsa died. We had been together 65 years.”

I do not know if this gentleman has ever visited the British Library, but it seems to me that he is both part of why it is there, and why it must continue to be there. There are values not directly aligned to the money nexus, and there are emotions and experiences too deep for easy comfort. There are many of us who find great resource in the continuity of culture. Museums and libraries allow connection, and often when everything else feels broken. I can’t put a price on that, but I know that it’s worth paying.

View the petition to keep the British Library free to users

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