It’s World Book Day today! Children all over the country are heading to school dressed up as their favourite book character. My 12 month old great niece even went to nursery in a Very Hungry Caterpillar costume.
Unfortunately, MPs don’t dress up, but some have marked the occasion. Here’s Christine Jardine on books at lunchtime in her office:
I’m not sure why Tom Gordon is reading Brave New World when he could just watch the news. He said on Twitter:
Happy World Book Day. I’m currently reading Brave New World for the first time. There’s probably a joke here about the state of the world and reading a dystopian novel.
Adam Dance, aware of the impact of Dyslexia, wrote to the Education Secretary to ask for more action to help pupils with the condition:
On #WorldBookDay, I’ve written to @bphillipsonMP urging more support for dyslexic pupils.
With 1 in 10 people having dyslexia—including 1M+ school children—too many miss out on reading due to lack of support. pic.twitter.com/HOwQPvyQSi
— Adam Dance MP (@Adamjamesdance) March 6, 2025
A very sobering thought from a bookshop owner I know who said that the free World Book Day books given to children are often, for children on free school meals, the first book they have ever owned. I loved reading as a child, I always had my nose in a book. It took me out of my own head and made me imagine. Reading is so enjoyable and really helps you learn and develop as a person and it’s so sad that reading for pleasure is on the wane.
Anyway, what books are you reading at the moment? I’m enjoying When we speak of freedom the new book edited by our friend Paul Hindley and published by the John Stuart Mill Institute.
The Lib Dem Conference account on Bluesky replied, when I asked the same question that they were reading Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism, a must read for every party member.
And just off the top of my head, would anyone be interested in an LDV Book Club type thing where we read a book every few months and have a Zoom meeting to discuss it?
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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12 Comments
Might the fact that children whose families are so poor that they cannot afford to feed their children properly and safely and so cannot afford a book/books, demonstrate the profound “CUMULATIVE DISADVANTAGE” consequences of Neoliberalism?
“Early advantages lead to further advantages, whereas early disadvantages lead to a cascade of additional disadvantages and risks.”
As more than 20% of our children live with being underfed, might it be that some 20% of our children do not have a book?
With this ongoing disaster, what sort of future does nation face?
I currently have two books on the go.
“Forged in War: A military history of Russia from its beginnings to today” by Mark Galeotti. I bought it when he spoke last week at the Global Strategy Forum event at the National Liberal Club, and got him to sign it.
“King’s Kalashnikov Sicilian” by Daniel King. This is an electronic book about a particular variation of the Sicilian Defence in chess.
@ Steve Trevethan – This is why we need local libraries, which are more than just shelves of books.
We seem to have lost something since my childhood, where it was normal to use libraries (even in then “safe blue seat” Hertfordshire) to now where they are only somewhere for “the less well off”; a bit like buses.
Suspect a contributor to the situation was the breaking of the net price agreement so Amazon and supermarkets could stack high and sell cheap. Another would seem to be a killing(?) of aspiration, where parents don’t encourage their children to read; probably because there isn’t the money for books and they lack a “feel good” factor that their children could have more opportunities. (Remember the at the time analysis of the Leave vote, was a large underclass who thought Westminster didn’t care and so they blooded Westminsters collective nose by voting leave.)
Thanks to Roland for drawing to our attention examples of the direct and indirect consequences of the inherent anti-social greed of Neoliberalism!
@Roland: I doubt that lack of money for books is the most important factor in parents not encouraging children to read. May sometimes be an issue, but In many cases it’s more likely to be, parents simply not caring or having no interest in books themselves. After all, if you do care about reading but don’t have much money, there are ample sources of cheap/free books in libraries and charity shops etc, as well as book-swap groups.
@Steve: Have you ever considered trying to write something that doesn’t seek to gratuitously blame every problem under the sun on ‘neoliberalism’? 😉
@Caron: A book club thing sounds an intriguing idea. I’ve just started re-reading a book called ‘Discovering Relativity for Yourself’ which is an extremely well written attempt to explain Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity in ways that a non-scientist might understand. But I’ll pass on the chance to dress up as Einstein. I don’t think the hairstyle would suit me 🙂
@Simon R – I agree with the problem of parents not being interested in books. My reference to “feel good” was simply trying indicate there are many soft factors that may encourage such parents not to encourage their children to do different.
Yes reading is a problem, my daughter devours books, whereas my son prefers manga or to “read” by watching the film… I suspect with more people looking at social media sound bites they are not developing the attention span and thinking processes necessary to read a book.
I think price works several ways. As books became more affordable, those with money will tend to buy and start to form the mindset that you allude to ie. Become blind to the problem and thus see libraries et al as cost centres…
A church in a deprived area in Northamptonshire, runs a regular (circa 3 monthly) book sale, and people will walk out with shopping bags full of books (10p per book/jigsaw), many being returned for the next sale… So I suggest things (as usual) aren’t cut and dry…
As an aside…My first school was a convent school and my class was allowed to choose a book to read from a battered and well worn library selection.. I was just 6 and must have been a bit slow in choosing and the sister told me to take the book I had just taken from a shelf…It was an old, off-red book with a broken spine and when I read the title of the book I’d been stuck with I thought it was a boring history book…
‘William the Bad’ opened a whole new experience for me and, ever since, I’ve read and re-read those glorious stories…
BTW…My current ‘read’ is The Birth of Time… by John Gribbin
Might it be possible to have some detail/ definition relating to the phrase “gratuitously blame every problem under the sun on “neoliberalism”?
@ expats Ah, the joys of William Brown by Richmal Crompton (daughter of an Anglican clergyman with Liberal Party sympathies.
I well remember the book, ‘William the Politician’ in which our hero describes the political parties of the day :
” There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”
I am reading America in 1857 A Nation on the Brink – by Kenneth M Stamp a fascinating account of the events that inevitably led to the Civil War.
Reading the post brought back memories of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a classic story about totalitarianism and the book readers who defy it.
@Steve: I’m not sure if you intended that as a serious or a rhetorical question, as I’d have thought the phrase self-explanatory? But if there’s any doubt, I intended ‘gratuitously’ to refer to, bringing out and blaming ‘neoliberalism’ even when the topic being discussed has nothing to do with economics or our economic system, and when there are other much more plausible explanations for the problem being discussed, without any apparent rational reason to bring ‘neoliberalism’ into the discussion – to an extent where – at least to my eyes – it starts to look like an attempt to just scapegoat ‘neoliberalism’ at every opportunity rather than serious attempts to think through what the causes of each problem are likely to be. But maybe I’ve misunderstood something?
@David Raw 7th Mar ’25 – 3:54pm…
David, from your past posts I should have realised that you, too, were a fan of ‘William’..
BTW.. If memory serves the ‘story’ you refer to had William ‘spying’ though a hatch with an old picture frame around his neck.. Ah, those bygone, simpler days..