#british-library

#british-library

Outside the entrance to the red brick library, around 130 employees chant in unison, blow on brightly coloured plastic horns and cheer when passing drivers honk in support. Money, Money, Money by ABBA blasts out of a surprisingly powerful portable speaker. Yet beneath the jovial atmosphere is a sense of profound exasperation. I don't want to be out here dancing on a picket line. I want to be in there, doing my job, and getting a decent wage for it, says one library assistant.

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