Jamie Stone

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I have a pub quiz question for the Minister: which historic figure has the greatest number of busts in the United States? People might say George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, but the truth is that it is Robbie Burns. That is because, as the hon. Member for Stirling and Strathallan (Chris Kane) referred to, Andrew Carnegie paid for a huge number of libraries in the States and one of the conditions was that each library had to have a bust of Scotland’s national bard. Another interesting fact—I am obviously on form today—is that Andrew Carnegie also built many libraries across Scotland and all over the UK, and indeed all over the world. He put one in particular in the village near his castle of Skibo in Sutherland—in the village hall, the building of which he also paid for. So, we can say that in the world there are two Carnegie Halls. The great-grandson of Andrew Carnegie, Mr William Thomson, tried in recent times to get Dolly Parton to come and sing in Sutherland’s Carnegie Hall, but sadly she demurred. Like the hon. Member for Stirling and Strathallan, when I was a boy I visited the Carnegie library in my home town of Tain. I did rather worse than running up a fine; I actually lost a book. It was Enid Blyton’s “Five Get Into A Fix” and losing it put me in a hell of a fix. I avoided going to the library for the next two years because I was petrified of the librarian, Mr Sellar. It was only later, when I was at secondary school, that I took up the habit of using a lending library. Today I am still a member of my lending library in Tain and use it regularly. In 1909, one of my predecessors as the MP for the north of Scotland, Sir Arthur Bignold, presented a stuffed crocodile to Wick’s Carnegie library, and it is still there. I have no intention of following in Sir Arthur Bignold’s footsteps; I do not have any stuffed crocodiles handy at the moment. I will cite a couple of facts. A recent survey showed that 16% of the Scottish population visit a library once a week, and slightly over a third visit a library once every month. I will not try to elaborate on the excellent points that have already been made about how important libraries are to civil society. As others have said, old people use them. I remember the demise of bookshops being predicted some years ago; some people thought that the internet would get rid of them. That is not the case, because books are selling more now than ever before. Books are part of the way that we do things as human beings, whatever language and whatever form they are in. Like others, I see libraries as crucial to the happiness of society. Finally, rather than posing another pub quiz question to the Minister, I will say that I very much look forward to hearing his response to the debate; I am sure that it will contain a lot about best practice and proposals. Would he be kind enough to share his thoughts with the Scottish Government at an appropriate point? I am sad that there are no representatives of the Scottish Government here, but we see a worrying number of closures north of the border. I completely understand that this is a devolved matter, but I am duty bound to take up my constituents’ concerns.