By SC Cook, Photo: National Library of Wales. Photo by csmramsde, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
A CAMPAIGN LED BY WORKERS, THEIR UNIONS AND PEOPLE ACROSS WALES MADE WELSH GOVERNMENT BACK OFF FROM PLANS TO CUT JOBS AT THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES, BUT THE BATTLE IS FAR FROM OVER. UNIONS SAY THEY NOW HAVE TWO YEARS TO FIGHT FOR PROPER FUNDING TO SAVE THE TREASURED INSTITUTION AND REJECT THE IDEA THAT THE LIBRARY CAN BE RUN LIKE A BUSINESS.
In recent weeks, news broke of a major restructure plan at the National Library of Wales, which if implemented would have seen 30 jobs disappear, a drastic reduction in services and the cutting of access to some of Wales’ most precious pieces of cultural history.
Sold as a means of plugging a £1million deficit, the restructure would have meant that the library had lost almost 100 jobs since 2008, and plunged its very existence into doubt.
As soon as the plans were announced, there was an outpouring of anger against the idea that Welsh Government would let this treasured institution go to the wall. At midnight before a key vote in The Senedd, Welsh Government suddenly announced a £2.25million funding package to stop the immediate threat to jobs.
There was relief among staff and unions, but this was tempered by the knowledge that the threat of redundancies hasn’t gone away, and the effects of a decade of underfunding and the prospect of market driven reforms, which see the library’s role as one of income generation above public service, remain all too real.
Unions reacted to the news with positivity and a degree of caution. In a statement, the PCS union branch said it ‘Welcomes the announcement,’ but added: “we note that there is an urgent need to ensure a better and fairer funding model for the library in the long-term.” The Prospect union said that the package announced by the Welsh Government was “a victory for unions” and “hopefully demonstrates a renewed commitment to preserving our important heritage.”
Untenable
The victory was real: Welsh Government would have made the devastating cuts if it hadn’t been for the scale of opposition. Reflecting on how they stopped 30 workers being made redundant, Doug Jones, chair of the PCS branch at the library who has worked there for 28 year, says he thinks it’s “all down to the public campaign that was run.”
With both main unions in the library joining forces to fight the cuts, and 14,000 people signing a Senedd petition, he says Welsh Government was forced into a corner.
“You were seeing more and more political groups, but also groups in the library sector and the culture sector getting behind the campaign,” he says. “And I think that put Welsh Government in a position where not providing extra funding was not going to be tenable.”
“It just tells you how effective a good campaign can be…I think that’s a good takeaway from it, that, you know, we can apply pressure on governments to make them change their minds. That’s positive.”
In a period where so many jobs and services in the public sector have been lost, successes against cuts are rare but not unheard of in Wales. In 2016. workers in the PCS union at the National Museum of Wales went on strike for 8 weeks against plans to cut their pay and reduce the service, and won a major victory against Welsh Government.
Successful battles were waged against library closures in Cardiff in 2015 and the ending of A&E provision at Royal Glamorgan Hospital at the beginning of 2020. Both showed how big campaigns which oppose the logic of austerity outright can win, but often the threat of cuts remain.
The National Library of Wales is no different, and Doug describes the victory as giving them two years of breathing space to fight for “a permanent funding model for the library.”
He points out that the legacy of 12 years of austerity has meant that the National Library is in an extremely precarious place, even before any fresh cuts were considered.
“Since 2008 our budget has been reduced by 40% and we’ve lost somewhere like a quarter of staff, I think, 24% of staff in that time as well. And you know, with the COVID crisis on top of this, I think you’re just seeing those decades of austerity, those decades of underfunding really coming home to roost,” he explains, adding that workloads on the remaining staff have only increased.
On top of this, the Welsh Government says that the library must speed up the implementation of the Tailored review, which whilst recognising the dire funding situation, nevertheless insists that the library “will need to generate additional income or continue to deliver further savings” if it is to survive in its current form.
The emphasis on income generation comes off the back of Ken Skates’ tenure as culture minister, when the library’s potential was seen more as a business and tourist destination.
“There seems to be this neoliberal mindset in Welsh Government that, you know, we’re only valuable if we can turn a profit,” explains Doug. “They don’t seem to see the social value in somewhere like the library…[we’re] not going to be able to make much income. Because our core function is to provide things for free to people”
The social value of libraries
The National Library of Wales has over 6 million books and newspapers and is one of six legal deposit libraries in Britain, meaning they can request a copy of any book printed in the UK. On top of this, it has 40,000 manuscripts, 1.5 million maps and 1,900 cubic metres of archives. It houses some of Wales most treasured cultural artefacts, as well archiving film, audio and working with the public to record life in Wales.
For Doug, the power of this vast collection only comes to life through the ability of people to use it. “We offer anyone over 16 free access to loads of different material…so you know, the poorest people in communities in Wales can have access,” he says. “We’ve been taking artworks out to schools in deprived areas.”
In fact the library does far more than simply retain historical material and allow people to view it, it also uses its resources to reach out and help people.
“We are actually a cultural institution, and we’re a memory institution,” says Jill, who works at the library but who didn’t want to give her real name. “We use our collections for projects, such as the Living Memory Project…[where] we’re putting facts together for people who have memory problems, such as people living with dementia and stuff, and then they’re using these packs for reminiscence therapy.”
Jill, who often works directly with the public, recalls a time when she helped a reader who drove for hours to find a book that their grandfather had written. “And I found it for this person. And they just told me that it was really important for them because they could read what grandfather had written. I don’t know whether or not this person knew their father or had met their grandfather before…this person could reconnect with their grandfather. And I think things like that are overlooked.”
She says the importance of the work the library does is in safeguarding the future. “You can learn from the past…But we also need to protect the present because the present is going to be the past soon.”
“We have people who can speak Latin, we have people who can read like old handwriting,” she says. “And they can unlock like secrets from the past that some people might not be able to.”
The campaign to save the National Library has put these things into the spotlight, and Jill describes feeling “really emotional” from the support they had. “When you hear about other people’s stories, of how they’ve been a reader and stuff… it does make you feel like, ‘Oh, this is why we do this kind of thing.’”
Writing on the Undod blog, Huw Williams described the importance of the library to the town and people of Aberystwyth, calling it “a building and institution that is integral to the landscape and the memory it shaped.”
But the experience of the last few weeks has also highlighted the vital role of all libraries, and exposed the shocking way in which so many of these learning institutions have been allowed to go to the wall in the last 10 – 12 years.
In 2019, a study by UNISON Cymru found that since 2010, a third of libraries in Wales had either closed, been privatised or were now run by volunteers In total there had been a decrease of 87 council-run libraries.
“We’ve lost so many of the smaller libraries,” says Jill. “And it’s almost like being told that you’re not allowed to learn. I mean, people go to school, but some people when they finish school, they like going to libraries to learn more things. And it’s almost like saying that you’re not allowed….like it’s being censored.”
For Doug from the PCS, libraries are vital institutions for working class life and politics.
“If you look at the miners libraries,” he says. “They played a really important role in working class culture, you know, the self taught working class intellectual and stuff like that.”
Too much acquiescence to austerity
For years, the Welsh Labour Government has simply administered austerity in Wales, taking budget cuts from a Tory administration in Westminster without objection and handing them down to local councils, who often decided that libraries would be among the first things to go.
The anti-austerity group People’s Assembly Wales – who joined the campaign to stop National Library of Wales cuts and led the successful effort against Cardiff library closures in 2015 – estimates that around £3.5bn has been cut from public services in Wales since 2009.
I ask Doug directly if he thinks Welsh Government should have done more to refuse the imposition of cuts that have decimated public services.
“Yeah,” he replies. “I don’t think they’ve done enough to combat austerity to be honest. There’s too much acquiescence in it… it makes you think where Welsh Labour is at.”
In the downward spiral of cuts, it has often been workers and their unions, ordinary people and grassroots groups on the left which have led the fight to stop their services and communities being shut down. Many politicians at local level and some at national level have joined these campaigns, but the political response overall has been incredibly tame.
The experience of the National Library of Wales shows that governments pushing austerity can be beaten, but the fight is far from over.
