Updated 7 November 2010:

This morning, I went to the Shepherd’s Bush library on the Westfield shopping site to help out at a small protest that a group of Hammersmith and Fulham librarians had organised.

The librarians’ salaries (library assistants earn about £21,000) are due to be cut as part of Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council’s gleeful pursuit of ‘savings’ and local annihilation of any notion of community, or public service. The home library service is to be dismantled and word is that some local libraries will shut.

Tis my view that closing local libraries ranks near book-burning as a social contribution, but what would I know, I suppose. Hammersmith and Fulham libraries will close and the free reading sessions and activities for kids they provide will disappear, along with the books, CDs, DVDs and free computers that so many enjoy and need. The reading and IT classes for adults that many libraries run will take their place among history’s sweeter dead, like sonnets. Thus it is that the Tories plan to build a happy, deficit-free tomorrow. My main hope in life these days is that I won’t be around to see it.

Anyway – the protest. Three or four librarians – all middle aged women – stood outside the library for about an hour in their own free time and handed leaflets about their worries to members of the public. I was there – no spring chicken myself – along with two long-time reps from the Hammersmith Unison office, and a well-known local blogger and a reporter. My leg hurt and we were all moving slowly because it was cold and we were all getting old. Armed rebellion was hardly on our agenda.

But hey-ho and you never know – suddenly, we found ourselves surrounded by four or five very heavy-looking guys in black jackets – Westfield security. Thus the high camp began. These guys were ridiculously combative – Christ knows what they had on the PS3 back in the office. At least one member of our group was hanging out to meet the resource-allocation genius that decided to send in five heavies to take out three librarians.

The first guy in the video below was incredibly aggressive – ‘you can’t be here. You haven’t got permission. You have to get out.’

He got very upset when he saw I was filming. He came after me down the street, putting his hand out every now and then towards me – I thought he was going to try and grab the camera and maybe even grab me. I hurried down the road – another slow-moving, near-fogey on the run – then back up Uxbridge Road and down a side street so that I could film the scene from across the road. So far, so very tragic. People on the sidewalk were laughing, watching my little legs trotting off to safety.

You can see three of these guys on the film, standing over the women who were protesting:

You can also see one of the guys rush at the camera on Chris’ blog.

There were so many security guys hassling the librarians that people walking by observed that security inside Westfield itself had to be compromised and that now was the time to start thieving.

So. This is how public sector cuts for the hell of it look when you get down to it, people – four or five probably-badly-paid security guys trying to score points off three greying librarians on a pavement. And all for a handful of change in public-sector savings. I don’t think that this is us at our best, you know. I’d cry, if I was the type.

Here’s one of the library assistants – a ten year veteran of the job – explaining the reasons why she wanted to hand out leaflets (it was her day off, so she wasn’t on library time). She also talks about the work library assistants do.

I’ve had a lot of stupid days in my life, but today really took the biscuit.