Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey with supporters in Primrose Hill

• CAMDEN Libraries Users’ Group (CPLUG) would like to echo the praise and support you reported for the volunteers who have kept Primrose Hill Community, formerly Chalk Farm, library open and thriving, (Tory mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey praises fight that saved library, February 21). It is an invaluable community asset which is a joy for all to visit.

At a time when social and cultural spaces such as post offices, bank branches, pubs, and small independent shops and cafés in our towns and city centres are disappearing fast, libraries are becoming more, not less, central to our daily lives and senses of identity, home, and belonging.

However we would also like to join those who described the praise for library volunteers by Conservative London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey as hollow. Indeed his words are hypocritical humbug. The present Conservative government has relentlessly reduced support for local services of all kinds, including libraries.

We recall those days in the late 1990s when CPLUG and Camden residents, supported at every turn by your newspaper, waged a two-year battle to reverse the council’s then declared intention to close and sell off nearly half the borough’s libraries.

With cross-party involvement, including 13 brave Labour councillors, council members challenged and reversed this intended policy. Most of the libraries have remained open.

We are desperately afraid that the dismal anti-social project of running down local government services espoused by Mr Bailey’s party is about to let loose a new era of library closures and or downgrades.

But we will join the heroic volunteers (at many of our libraries in Camden today) in finding ways to boost the capacities of libraries to fight off attempts from any quarter to damage them or their staff in any future round of spending cuts.

TOM SELWYN
Former Chair of Camden Public Libraries Users’ Group