If there is one thing governments know it's if you want to control the people, turning them into a cowed, compliant, obedient mass prepared to repeat and believe whatever the authoritarian populists tell them, then you do just one thing: you take away their access to books.

In an extreme case, you destroy their libraries and control what they see and read.

They’re dangerous things books.

Perhaps more dangerous are the librarians that dare to give books out to children who are poor but know how to take them seriously.

Libraries make people powerful — people who shouldn’t be powerful — and we’ll be weaker in untold ways without them.

Libraries can topple governments, change society, make people think in dangerous independent ways.

They make people think for themselves. Governments can't have that. No wonder demagogues throughout history, Pol Pot, Hitler, Isis and Chaiman Mao, burned the books whenever they could.

I am not comparing Councillor Sue Barker or Essex County Council to any of those.

But still they close libraries, to save a tiny amount.

"Books are cheap," they say, "and it's all online".

Well, no, they are not cheap, nor are they all online, and they are certainly not free at the point of consumption.

A decent children's novel costs a tenner, which might be better spent on food, heating, a warm coat.

When I was young, even a single book would cost more than my parents would have been able to afford on our total income of £8 a week.

As a child I read five books, maybe more, a week. As many books as I could carry, some turned out to be unreadable, others changed my life.

Books are more than learning, more than stories, and, yes, more than escape.

There’s the romantic, over-done form of escapism that can be found within books, yes.

But just as important is the real, concrete escape that books give: you can wave those pages and the words on them at everyone from teachers to politicians and start asking questions.

I am who I am and how I am because of two things: the public library and the furious discussions I had about their contents with teachers friends, family.

In what way did libraries make me? Being shown a book by the librarian I had no idea was perfect for me; pulling a book I had never heard of off the shelf and discovering it is the best book I had ever read; the discovery of a book series and the endless quest for all the others; the joy of finding one I hadn’t read three times already; finding the book on the wrong shelf and discovering that you simply could not put it down; being able to explain in class why an aeroplane flew because you had read about in Biggles and why the coral reefs were in danger because of that book by Jaques Cousteu; and telling a teacher you wanted to know more about Suffism because you had found a book called Nasrudin (which intrigued me because of the cartoons in it but had some interesting ideas).

Libraries exist to educate, inform and serve those without the ability to pay.

They offer professional assistance, community spaces, neutrality, help in job-hunting, training, boosting literacy and life-long prospects.

They offer a warm place, somewhere to read the papers, have a snooze, research family history, ask where you can get a grant, look up public records and read old maps.

Our libraries were the envy of the world. Now? Just another loss-making drain on the public purse.