Dreadful MP of the Week: Glenda Jackson

I’m most grateful to Selena Gray for publicising Glenda Jackson’s response to the notion that volunteers might run a library that Brent council has threatened to close. I don’t think, however, Selena goes nearly far enough.

Firstly, it cannot be pointed out too often that any library closures are the responsibility of councils, not central government. The latter may not send as much money to the former as it did in previous years but the decisions on what to spend the money councils do have are entirely a matter for the councils themselves. If your local library or swimming pool closes it’s because your local council has decided to spend money elsewhere.

Hark at Glenda however and her appraisal of what libraries do:

“For young people who are looking for work, are very confused by the benefits system and have no computer access of their own, the local library is the first port of call, because the equipment and the information are there, and highly skilled and highly trained people can help them.”

Of course libraries have “diversified” in recent years and, sure, that’s often been useful. Who knew, however, that their most important role – in Ms Jackson’s view anyway since her dismal comments as reported on her own website make no mention of any other use for libraries – is to serve as a repository for computers from which the young and the unemployed can access the benefits system?

This would, in fairness, explain or even justify her belief that:

Finally, while acknowledging and welcoming the valiant efforts of volunteers, she called on the Government to acknowledge that volunteers could not cope with the complexity of running public libraries with no funding from councils. “The legal issues and historic building maintenance required, let alone the knowledge and expertise that library workers currently provide, cannot be sustained without Government funding, nor should it”.

Quite so. And, by that measure, if swimming pool attendants are also expected to be tax advisors it might be difficult for them to be simply swimming pool attendants. Even so, it’s a nonsense to suppose that volunteers cannot run a library, even if you insist that a library must also function as something much more than the simple purchasing and lending of books.

Ms Jackson’s own argument  – I use the term loosely – suggests that volunteers, no matter how valiant, cannot run anything since everything is terribly complex these days. This will be news to the thousands or millions of people who currently volunteer at their local rugby or football or cricket club, all of whom must spend a depressing amount of time dealing with needless or idiotic or intrusive government-sponsored regulation. And yet despite these impediments – many of which are wholly unecessary – these organisations manage to survive and even, sometimes, thrive. Government, whether local or central, however, is an obstacle not a “facilitator”. It also imposes costs.

The dismal thing about the Jackson weltanschauung is not so much her own simpering, smug idiocy (though that’s bad enough) but her apparent belief that people are uniformly simpletons who cannot organise anything for themselves, let alone for their mutual benefit. The logic, if such exists, of her views is that nothing can exist independent of the state.

I am not an especially violent person and I do not like fish but if you were to place Glenda Jackson in a barrel of fish I don’t know which I’d shoot first in that target-rich environment…