Yesterday I was in the midst of posting the news that Oxfordshire County Council was backing down a little from its attack on youth centres [and libraries] when I was informed it had retracted its position. I was a bit down, but I was rescued from the doldrums through receiving the link to this video from Nisha.

Evidently the group, Show of Hands, did a revised version of the song on the Andrew Marr Show this last Sunday with William Hague, forced to listen, squirming in his chair. It’s an eminently singable, contemporary protest song in the best folk music tradition. I caught myself carousing in the bath. As Nisha says, ‘spread the word’ and we’ll all be singing it together.

And talking of libraries, here is a link to the transcript of Philip Pullman’s eloquent speech, ‘This is the Big society, you see!’, introduced on Open Democracy thus:

Oxfordshire’s County Council pounced on the ‘Big Society’ to deflect responsibility, suggesting that communities bid for sums to run libraries – and a range of other services – on a volunteer basis. Aside from denigrating the professionalism of librarians, Philip wonders where the volunteers will come from….

and from this wondrous question he builds one of the most eloquent critiques so far of the impact of the Coalition’s assault on the public sector and its market fundamentalism, which he describes as a kind of fanaticism: “The theory says that they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences…never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane”.