DURING the Second World War, when the Royal Navy was sustaining appalling losses evacuating British forces from Crete, Admiral Cunningham silenced those who wished to abandon the troops with the remark that it takes three years to build a ship but 300 years to build a tradition.

Mr Mitchell and his bean-counters might well ponder these words as they slash funding from so many local libraries.

The local library is the last great legacy of the Victorian tradition of self-improvement; for well over 100 years, libraries have been at the heart of local communities.

Anyone who doubts this should go to any of the threatened libraries. There they will see mothers introducing their young children to the pleasures of reading and browsing; storytellers surrounded by young listeners experiencing the thrill of just having a story read to them (all too often squeezed out of the school day by our mechanistic curriculum); older children finding a haven to complete homework when home might be unsuitable for quiet study; people of all ages enjoying that most environmentally sustainable activity – borrowing a library book.

I could go on: there is so much on offer at any local library that I can only suppose that anyone who can contemplate their closure can not have visited one recently.

Just how have the libraries been selected for closure?

Does Mr Mitchell really think that mothers with several children or elderly citizens are going to climb on to a bus (a costly exercise in itself) and travel several miles to a library?

Does he really think that professionally-trained librarians can be replaced by a rota of volunteers, however well-meaning. It would be easier to replace councillors!

Libraries in areas which have very little else at the heart of their communities are to be closed. How cynical is that?

We cannot all whistle up our reading matter from Amazon and the like and, besides, the sheer benefit of browsing in a library should not be cast aside so lightly.

Before it is too late, perhaps we could have a debate on how the essential savings are to be made.

Slimming a few expenses accounts might be a start.

MARTIN ROBERTS, Stone Close, Botley