“Exactly where has this 'concept' (yeuch!) been tried and tested? I thought all the library takeovers were on hold.

No one but a politician like Hawthorne could steal money from you and then tell you he was giving you improved service.”

“In two weeks time I will be telling the children and young people that I work with that their club is to close, formally county council funded we are now awaiting bids to continue this work, but the length of time funders are taking (as so many organisations are putting in bids) means that we have no option now but to close. In the area I work there will be a reduced and moved library and very little youth service. I love my job and am sad to see it go, am I supposed to do it for free now and take benefits? My pay is small but the pay off for this work is huge, I have loved every minute. I feel that the coalition government has devalued the many years of hard work and experience that people who work in this sector do and are now giving away buildings to the most cost effective bid, therefore expecting people to do this sort of work on the cheap. I am concerned that volunteers cannot be expected to give huge full time commitments, safeguarding standards will start to slip, vulnerable people will suffer and buildings, resources and experience will be lost. We will end up with a worse society than before. I guess Mark Harper and this excuse for a government can then turn around and say it is our fault for not caring enough, whist drawing salaries that would keep my project open for a year, perhaps one of them could be a volunteer MP and forward his salary to a voluntary group in true BS style.”

“Community services work best when not run for profit.”

“The Big Community "Offer" is just blackmail. We'll remove your service, but if YOU want to run it, you can keep it. People are being forced to 'bid' to keep open a service that is the council's responsibility. I refused to offer my support when I got a leaflet through my door asking for a community bid for our local library - not because I don't think libraries are vital (they are, to many in our society), but because it is not a service that should be run by volunteers. The council should provide this service, and it should be run by professional librarians.”

“Why don't the Countcillors set an example and join The Big Society They could all become Volunteers and stop drawing their RIP OFF ALLOWANCES!!”

“No doubt about it Mark Hawthorne can certainly talk nonsense.”

“I do not recognise Cllr Hawthorne's picture. At all.

Gloucestershire has some of the most serious rural poverty in Britain. You see and sneer at the 4x4s and the weekend cottages. You don't see the majority of Gloucs people who are working all hours in hard jobs, whose first care is to keep a roof over their family's heads and who are, frankly, too damn tired to join in political wrangling.

Gloucestershire also has wonderful charity groups supporting every imaginable health and social care issue. Truth is, our 'Big Society' has already reached its limit. With more and more Gloucs people struggling to keep or find jobs, with benefits denied to those who most genuinely should qualify for them, there is NO SPARE CAPACITY for working for free to keep services going.

Let us examine these 'offers' and 'plans' in detail. It is right and fair to let the facts speak for themselves. And we'll see, I suspect, the mean and miserable reality underneath Cllr. Hawthorne's glowing vision.”

“I think this comment "I'm certain that councils across the country will have to think more and more about schemes like our Big Community Offer" is really the crux of the issue.

People have been mystified by Hawthorne's stubbornness, his arrogance and his unwillingness to back down when it has been explained time and again to him that he is probably breaking the law and that his plans are reckless and unsustainable.

Why is he insisting on making such a fool of himself? I suspect it is because this man wanted to be the poster boy of "the Big Society". This career politician thought he had it in the bag....Then library campaigners started changeling peoples outrage and started questioning him. He HATED this. It is making him FURIOUS. How dare the people of Gloucestershire get in his way. He was not expecting this and it makes him mad. So he gets all defensive, freezes people who do not agree with him out and retreats into his own little fictional world. This is the writing of a desperate man. Why does TiG continue to pander to his delusions by publishing his bizarre ramblings?”

“I attended a meting of concerned residents of Tuffley, Gloucester on a cold Friday evening to try to get a steering group in place to take over the threatened library. The local Three Bridges Community Partnership in response to the GCC "Big Community Offer" called the meeting. Local people gave their time freely but no one from GCC came to the meeting to give advice or provide information. The room contained librarians, teachers, local business people, community volunteers and interested residents. But when push came to shove and people were asked if they would be prepared to start a a management group for the library take over, of forty attendees only one hand was raised.
I reported on this to various bodies and the local county councillor for the Tuffley area contacted me. During our conversation he advised that the Tuffley Library building was in such disrepair that the only thing to do with it would be to demolish it and build a new. Part of the GCC " Big Community Offer" is to lease the library building to the new management group, presumably on a full repairing lease. What madness is this that the information was presented to me after the event but not given to the meeting? I think the concerned residents of Tuffley were very wise and have escaped a very complicated financial disaster. Have other so-called "interested parties" who are willing to take on local community buildings being provided with all the advice and help they need? What happens to a local group who take on a building and serious harm is caused to a member of the public who uses the building due to its ill repair? How many other local community buildings being prepared for take over are in the same state as Tuffley Library? Where do local groups find the resources to get expert help in the surveying of these buildings and there upkeep?
So many questions but we get no answers from GCC. It is a condition of the terms of employment that currently employed members of the Library service are forbidden to talk openly to interested local groups.
So this is the "Big Society" in action. Community surely means people working together and sharing responsibility for the benefit of local people. Local protest groups are trying to get a great library service for Gloucestershire and should be talked to. The Womens Institute today have launched their " Love a Library " campaign. A motion about library cuts was passed at their convention by a majority of 98%.
The situation with GCC and its library service is slowly descending into farce. I call on Mark Hawthorne to get off his macho cloud and start to engage with the residents of Gloucestershire who vote for him and pay his allowance.”

“Mark Hawthorne: "I really believe that services work best at their most local level so I was keen for this project to deliver."

If this is really true - if it's such a great idea to hand over libraries to volunteers in the local community, then why didn't Gloucestershire County Council (and other local authorities) come up with this idea long before:

(1) Central Government decided that The Big Society was the answer to everything?
(2) Local politicians decided that libraries were an easy target to cut funding from?

The only reason this is actually happening is because of these two points, not because "services work best at their most local level"... and neither of these points can justify the dismantling of any public library service.”