You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
The British Library is our great national home of cultural workers. We go there to read and research, to learn and to grow, to write and to think, to inspire and create. Facilitating our work is a great army of library staff, who are also cultural workers. Without them, the library does not function, the books do not get read, the culture does not come to pass. And how are they treated? According to their union, they are offered pay deals so dire that many of them work multiple jobs and live in substandard housing. Seventy one per cent of respondents to a union survey find their salary insufficient to meet basic needs. Some workers report mental and physical health deterioration as a consequence of these poverty wages. When a massive cyber-attack on the library results in a major disruption of the service they are able to offer, they’re left on the frontline, to be shouted at by the very patrons they are attempting to serve. And when they then try to ask for a pay increase that is at least in line with inflation, they are told there is no money, while some of the six-figure-salaried executives are eligible for five-figure bonuses. One of the other things we used to think about this country was that it had a bone-deep sense of fairness. Does any of that sound fair?
