Closing libraries is a fine way to keep the poor powerless

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Libraries represent one of the happiest accidents of British life — that somehow, across the country and outside of view of people who would otherwise shut it down, people managed to create communities unspoilt by the requirement that everything makes money. Libraries are often said to be fusty and staid — it might be true of the buildings, but it’s not true of the books that await teenagers there. It’s something of a privilege to complain about libraries — which are only falling victim to the same disease that is killing more immediately important things like social care — but they are important because they give the people who are the victims of those cuts the means and the confidence to complain about them. Libraries make people powerful — people who shouldn’t be powerful — and we’ll be weaker in untold ways without them.