Law of Unintended Consequences, Tory Division

April 12, 2012 Leave a comment

Are they idiots? Do they think? Wait a minute, let me rephrase that: why don’t the idiots think, apart from the fact that they are idiots? OK, so they didn’t realize that pensioners (the voting-est segment of the community) would be upset to have their pensions hacked away. And they didn’t realize that if they capped tax-relief on charity rich people would (d’oh!) give less.

Now we find that in their enthusiasm to remove any semblance of civic society, our luverly government has ensured (unintended, I have no doubt: they strike me as the kind of people who move their lips when they watch television) that if the libraries they have devastated reconfigure themselves as volunteer institutions, they will be breach copyright regulations when they lend books, and that PLR payments (the pennies paid to authors per book-loan, to compensate for lost sales) are not permitted on any books that they loan.

Nice one.

Filed under Charity, Death of the book, Libraries, Literature Tagged with , , ,

About inspectorbucket
Judith Flanders was born in London, England, in 1959. She moved to Montreal, Canada, when she was two, and spent her childhood there, apart from a year in Israel in 1972, where she signally failed to master Hebrew. After university, Judith returned to London and began working as an editor for various publishing houses. After this 17-year misstep, she began to write and in 2001 her first book, A Circle of Sisters, the biography of four Victorian sisters, was published to great acclaim, and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2003, The Victorian House (2004 in the USA, as Inside the Victorian Home) received widespread praise, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. In 2006 Consuming Passions, was published. Her most recent book, The Invention of Murder, was published in 2011. Judith contributes articles, features and reviews for a number of newspapers and magazines.

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