New rules for Reform-run libraries after Pride row

[IwantToRetire]

A Reform-led council has outlined proposals to govern displays in its libraries four months after the administration came under fire for banning LGBTQ+ Pride displays.

The new draft guidance, to be considered by a Staffordshire County Council scrutiny committee on Thursday, reveals which events will be marked with library displays, including local history, St George's Day, Remembrance Day and Armed Forces Day, as well as promotion for fostering and recycling in the county.

However, there is no place on the draft schedule for the year ahead for Pride, Black History Month or non-Christian cultural events.

The council said it wanted libraries to be politically neutral spaces open to everyone.

Councillors are due to vote on the draft guidance in November.

Article continues at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmz98k2q18pko

(Dont think this is the same Council as the one there was an ealier thread about.)

We're not talking about Sainsbury's, we're talking about libraries, some of which do mark South Asian Heritage Month. Your suggestion was they didn't.

Reform in this case do plan to mark Armed Forces Day.

Libraries are a universal public service open to all without fear or favour. In my view (as a librarian) they most certainly are and should be politically neutral.

Sorry meant to quote this.

And actually public libraries were set up to provide working men with an alternative to the pub.

A lot of libraries exist because Andrew Carnegie paid for them. They should be politically neutral. I daresay Reform would be happy for displays on local suffrage history or the Peasants' Revolt. I have no objection and indeed, am happy to see to displays for Diwali and Hanukkah (my DC celebrate Diwali) but I want to see one for Easter and Christmas as well (not instead) and somehow I never do (though we do have Christmas lights but they are paid for by the shops, I think).

This is not accurate and a quick Google would tell you that Public Libraries Act 1850 - Wikipedia https://share.google/bO5alD2AqHI45B7Mq
The 1964 Act was not the first piece of legislation around free public libraries and the driver as I have said previously was Victorian concern over where and how working men were spending their free time.

And while Andrew Carnegie very generously funded the building of many libraries the local authority were expected to provide the ongoing funding.

But what do you teach in Black History Month? Until the 60s there were relatively small numbers of black people in the UK and many were transitory i.e. like Gandhi, they came to study. There is not a lot one can say about John Blanc, Henry VIII's trumpeter (I wonder where he learned to play the trumpet, now that is worth finding out!) or Belle, who was a relation of Lord Mansfield. The anti-slavery movement was driven by people like Wilberforce, though the work of Equiano is noteworthy and interesting. Any digging will produce the presumably problematic fact (if one is looking for positive stories) that countries in Africa were slaving long before the Atlantic Trade and continue to slave to this day, and that the eastern trade out of Zanzibar by Arabs makes the Atlantic Trade look humane. Certainly that is worth teaching to older students. We could look at the first Asian MPs to sit in the UK Parliament (a colonial subject could stand for the UK parliament if resident in Britain) and at the work of suffragists in India.

Too true. Where do people get the idea that libraries were contested and not wanted by the ruling elites? This is not the case at all. I was using public libraries in the early 60s. They were full of books, not donated ones, either, but bought in new and I could order a book from another library (and still can, of course). Free libraries spring from the Victorian movement to improve education among the working people and to provide wholesome entertainment to working people - the main philanthropist involved in the UK is Andrew Carnegie, who funded libraries early in the twentieth century. Being a librarian in a public library has been a career for longer that the 1964 Act, it was well established when I was applying for university places in the mid-sixties.

It's a story about control. The controller is a woman who holds a younger woman in thrall and causes her potential rescuer to be deeply harmed. No, it's not about heterosexuality.

Mostly they are warnings. Some end with heterosexual romantic relationships but most are more concerned with how you get there - if you get there! Far more are about how to succeed (often by lying e.g Puss in Boots), how to negotiate the world (be nice to that ugly old woman by the road, she might be someone very important) and how to be safe. I read George MacDonald's fairy books when I was a child, and though love turned up in some stories there was no sexuality of any kind. I loved them. I still love them.

Thanks. Transparentlyannoyed doesn't know any history. Perhaps he/she should visit the local library and borrow some proper history books.

Sisters Uncut should stick to domestic violence. Gaza and Palestinians have nothing to do with feminism (unless you are supporting the Gazan women who have been and are the victims of domestic violence, forced marriage, rape, child marriage etc, of course).

Depends on the year group and ideally you vary it each year to keep it interesting. Romans are a good place to start because it puts migration into context - some children have no idea there were black people in Britain so long ago. Or you can go to the other end of the spectrum and discuss the Windrush generation. There’s loads really, and generally things that I didn’t learn about when I was growing up.

This is exactly the argument men make when they say women's rights have "gone too far".

Trans people responding to attacks on their right to exist aren't to blame for the far right. The far right is.

Trans people are bring used as a wedge issue to reduce the rights of women and gay people. And considering your homophobic remarks about Pride, it looks like they're succeeding.

Pride is a protest and celebration. Trans people are perfectly ordinary citizens who happen to be different.

It is ideological because it is a form of positive discrimination and implicitly assumes people from certain groups are disadvantaged. Some people oppose this in principle.

A wealthy, privileged Black or transgender author might be given prominence over a lesser-known white working-class author whose book a librarian simply loved.

As someone from another ethnic minority, I also feel alienated by Black History Month because there seems to be little equivalent effort to recognise other backgrounds.

Everyone knows about Windrush, and a London Overground line is named after it. But can anyone name the other ships that brought migrants to Britain? Probably not. Why do we recognise some histories while overlooking others and call it progress?

Talking bollocks again, I see.

Carnegie was from Dunfermline (that's in Scotland, just in case you're not familiar with the place) and he funded the building of over 600 public libraries across the UK and Ireland. They started building them in the 1880s, so that's 80ish years before the Act you think did it all?

My home town didn't need Carnegie's money, since we already had a magnificent library gifted to the town in the 1870s by one of our home-grown wealthy industrialists/philanthropists. In the Victorian era, Christianity was far stronger, and many industrialists believed philanthropy was their Christian duty.

The rest of your post is just word salad gittering.

Nobody is attacking trans identifying people's rights
Trans identifying people have all the same rights as they've always had since 2004 and the extra rights given to EVERYONE in 2010.
What they no longer have is womens rights which they stole by lieing, manipulation and emotional blackmail and when that didn't work for them anymore death and rape threats and finally physical violence.
The only people who are trying to remove the rights of women and same sex attracted people are the trans rights activists.
Pride is a political movement always was and apparently always will be, though where it once stood for acceptance of homosexualality and requesting equal rights for gay and bisexual people now its a vehicle for indoctrination, medically transitioning gay and autistic children and the superiority of trans rights above and beyond every other group. Basically its morphed into an anti rights group.

Of course it's massively sexual. Most fairy tales are, even if the Grimm brothers did their very best to sanitize them for their version - just think of Sleeping Beauty. I believe there are some research editions of what was reconstructive of the original folk versions, and it's VERY racy.

Why is Florence Nightingale a 'poor woman' because some people think she was gay? You do realise there's nothing wrong with homosexuality?

Of course there was massive homophobia in those days but that's the issue, not the fact that she may have been gay?

Why is Florence Nightingale a 'poor woman' because some people think she was gay? You do realise there's nothing wrong with homosexuality?

Because it trivialises the very real work FN did and her influence on turning nursing into a respected profession not something for old drunks like Mrs Gamp

Because it makes FN's conjectured sexuality the only thing of interest about her

Because FN's sexuality isn't even known

Because some of us get very fed up with the damned arrogance of the people retrospectively queering women of achievement and influence

Because who cares what FN did or didn't do for sex.

But especially the first point.

edited to add a point

Because she’s being represented as gay with no evidence, and used as a pawn in a political game rather than being given credit for her considerable achievements (which make her a great prize for said political movement). No one deserves to be misappropriated in such a way.

How do you know she wasn't. And as I keep saying, there's nothing wrong with being gay! And how on earth would you know how she might feel about it? That's just your own feelings.

That's just your own feelings.

As are those about her being gay. We don't know and it's the height of arrogance to attribute a particular sexuality to her just because she doesn't fit the stereotypical mould for a Victorian woman.

And as I keep saying, there's nothing wrong with being gay!

No-one's saying there is. What a lot of us don't like is outing figures in the past to fit a 21c agenda.

Abd how do you know she was??

abd isn't it incredibly heteronormative to decide a single woman must have been a lesbian instead of a woman making her own choices and being independent?