LIBRARIES ARE IMPORTANT

Dr Seuss said, ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn the more places you'll go.’

There once was a man; born into a poor family in the neighbouring town of Oldham. Aged 15, this uneducated teenage mill-worker happened across a second-hand dictionary. Its price was sixpence.

To buy that dictionary cost him two weeks' personal pocket-money!

By reading that dictionary from cover to cover; mastering and expanding his vocabulary, led him to discover and properly understand that the things that men have written about in books, opened a wider field of pleasure than all the small actualities of personal experience most of us can evolve throughout all the waking hours of our days.

That boy became the Leader of the Labour Party and led it through its major breakthrough in the 1922 general election when Labour went from 52 seats to 142 and became Home Secretary in 1929.

Today, despite local protests, the Labour led Tameside council, based in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne are closing public libraries.

Tameside’s councillors should remember that a love for reading begins with books, it also ends with it.

At a time when Tameside council are considered by Ofsted to be one of the lowest educational attainment authorities, could it be more than co-incidental that Tameside are closing many of their town’s libraries?