Proposal for New Cross Library, Delivered by Ms.

Portia
Kensington-Hogg in New Cross Library 05/02/11:

Boys and girls, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

I’m here in order to tell you what you need according to my interests as
representative of New Cross Library’s possible non-future. I work writing
gruesome fairy tales for the thinktank Policy Ex-cess which has been
lauded as the most influential thinktank today in continuing to shape a
complete contempt for anyone who hasn’t been educated at Eton.

Our vision is that Library services can be rationalised and made profitable
for us through ‘enabling’ you to volunteer your livelihoods, i.e. take
redundancy. Thereby allowing the library to be housed in other local
businesses per an ethos of ‘outreach’, a vision your valiant community-
minded councillors have advocated. Indeed under Ed Vaizey’s astounding,
almost absurdly brilliant, scheme ‘The Future Libraries Programme’,
Lewisham is one of the hand-picked areas of England to be educated, in
Big Society fashion, as to how to dismantle its libraries for the benefit of
supermarkets, and various private companies. Indeed every time you may
visit a ‘library’ in our Big Society, henceforth you will be doing a charitable
deed, since books can now be liberated from the shelves and the wage-
labour of the librarian- surely the kind of sacrifice you should be making in
order to allow for the total ineptitude of government?

You may be wondering why a councillor is not stood here offering you
their vision of the future. Well, to be frank, even though councillor’s are
cushioned by a management cabal who are payed in total roughly the
same amount that will be saved by their pogrom of cuts, we cannot expect
Cllr Bell to go out of his way beyond simply making speeches that are
blatantly hypocritical and void of substance, can we?

Indeed if you refer to this table showing the salaries of some of the most
significant puppets in the council [Chief Executive:£192,000 per year;
Customer Service Director: £141,000 per year; Director for Children &
Young People: £141,000 per year; The Director for Community Services:
£135,000 per year; Director of Recourses: £138,000 per year. The Prime
Minister earns £142,500 per year – just to put these salaries in
perspective!1]
detail from Lewisham against cuts website> you can see quite clearly why
even more taxpayer’s money must be wasted on thinktanks, and any
lingering beliefs you had in the usefulness of having councillors at all is
summed up very neatly in cllr Paul Bell’s recent speech delivered at the
vote for cuts taken by Lewisham council this November, to quote:

‘To the public I say this: we are not the resistance that our community
needs as we are bound by rules, regulations and laws. Democracy does
not end and begin with elected politicians but within the heart and soul of
every member of the community.’

Hear, hear. Indeed, when we at Policy Ex-cess hear words such as these
we wring our hands in joy knowing our vision for the public will not be
called to account by any kind of truly democratic process. Furthermore,
such aspirational addresses to the people enable the prioritising of the
1
http://laca.org.uk/whats-being-cut/
interests of organisations such as Lewisham Homes, who in actually
owning the building within which the library is housed, should really
shoulder responsibility for its survival, (since one of the excuses for ridding
ourselves of the library is that the building is not suitable). But, in our
opinion, this is not the best use of community assets as will become ever
more clear for example, when the government begins liquidating
universities to the toxic benefit of the equity market after the model of
that towering and untainted democracy; the United States.

The current government is ecstatic about the idea of privitising the

university (something we at Policy Ex-cess have lobbied tirelessly for). It’s
quite simple really, as the illustrious David Willets has been advocating
since 2007, ‘the model for UK universities should be US state universities’,
which we at Policy Ex-cess believe in to an even more profound degree
than our New Labour Neo-liberal predecessors. Indeed at Policy Ex-cess
we literally drool at the idea of liquidating failing universities in order to
allow for private interest to further itself.

In the US universities are dependent upon building up endowments which

are then invested in equities in order to compensate for lack of state
funding, which essentially totally exposes the university to the risks of
unstable equity markets and coerces universities to run themselves via
the much utilised ‘race to the bottom’ ethic, which heads of industry the
world over rely on to prop up their profit making. Yes, this is the
marvelous mechanism with which we will free up profit from stubborn and
inflexible institutions whose anachronistic pre-occupation with social worth
is simply not conducive to today’s forms of governance. For instance
through such economic vision Harvard enjoyed the disposing of 275 jobs
in 2009 due to their endowment tumbling by $12 billion between June
2008 and June 2009. It is this example which has so enamoured our
current government.

More than this perhaps is the manner in which privitisation enables

‘excellence’ to flourish. According to the National Centre for Public Policy
in Higher Education (A similar body in the UK being Quality Assurance
Agency which will be eradicated under this government due to its pesky
interest in outing profligacy and profiteering in education):

In the US ‘The cost of higher education has also grown to consume an

astonishingly high proportion of family income. Taking into account fees,
living costs and accommodation, and subtracting the aid provided by
bursaries, grants, the NCPPHE calculates that in 2007-8: public higher
education cost 28% of median family income, and private university cost
76% of median family income.
But of course, poor families paymore than wealthier families. Low income
families in the US can now expect to consume 55% of their income on a
public college education, as opposed to 39% in 1984, whereas the richest
families still consume less than 9% of their income on college.’2

Clearly, under privitisation we will finally be able to do away with having to

concern ourselves with pretending like we think education is an

2
The full pdf detailing the effects of, and motives for, privitising universities can
be found at http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2296
entitlement, and may openly express the fact it is a privilege. Further, due
to the fees becoming so astronomical the notion of actual knowledge as a
public good can also be done away with, thus making it a lot easier for us
to do away with public libraries and not-for-profit schools.

Alas, due to tighter regulatory controls regarding the rights of private

business to exploit the public sphere unaccountably, the UK is not as lucky
as the US. However, at Policy Ex-cess we envision the almost total
dismantling of any regulations regarding the extent to which private
enterprise may operate like a public university. Essentially our desire to
lift any cap on tuition fees is part and parcel of the creation of an era in
which everyone must acknowledge everything must be made attractive to
private wealth otherwise it might as well not exist. Public-private
partnerships are the visionary methodology with which we enable private
cos to exploit the inherent and heretofor largely unexchangeable value of
education as kernel of the institutions that exist for it.

Community libraries and further education are obviously both incredibly

important for any healthy society. But currently they are not quite doing
what we at the core of government ideology want. That is, they are not
allowing private wealth to run totally rampant. Of course the first step is to
ensure a network of local councils that help government continue to
‘partner’ public institutions with private wealth. Lewisham council has of
course been applauded for its welcoming of various PFI’s in order to
maintain the heinous standards of housing for residents of Lewisham.
Keeping their ‘duties’ in mind they are making sure to cut other surplus
social services such as foster care, Social workers, Road cleaining, the
Auditing and Corruption office, and early childhood services. A sound and
realistic business decision I think you’ll agree- keeping the location of
democracy firmly and intangibly in the hearts of the constituents, where
we at Policy Ex-cess believe it should remain.

So, how is this relevant to New Cross library? Well, Public-private

partnerships are the visionary methodology with which we enable private
cos to exploit the inherent and heretofor largely unexchangeable value of
education as kernel of the institutions that exist for it. As you may be
aware thinktanks love using neologisms and management speak in order
to make sense of the messy, inadequate and lowly social realm we have
taken upon ourselves to govern, so please now turn to this easy-to-
understand flow chart showing how privitisation and the cuts will work
together to allow for the vision we have for our Big Society.

<Flow chart showing:

Private-public partnerships work thus: cuts by central government, no

resistance from cowardly councillors, private interests move in, public
services are squeezed to the point that they can no longer provide for
those who cannot pay, councillors remain well paid, consultant groups
profit, communities subsidise more and more the loss of what is rightfully
theirs while the rich walk away richer. >

Thank you so much for being here today, as has been repeatedly stated
by David Cameron we support the right to protest especially if it is done
quietly and to no affect, so I would finish by cautioning you not to make
too much of a spectacle of yourselves.