IN DEPTH
Dominic Cummings: Libraries are ‘desperately needed’
Will the PM’s chief special adviser (Spad) Dominic Cummings prove to be an unlikely cheerleader for libraries and knowledge management in Government? CILIP reporter Rob Mackinlay looks at his arguments for reforming information and knowledge management culture in government.
DURING the 2019 General Election Boris Johnson said he loved libraries and wanted to invest in opening more of them, but added: “We can only do that if we get the economy motoring.” His special adviser, Dominic Cummings, has no such conditions attached to his support for libraries.
He sees them as fundamental to the survival of the country – as one of the few things that should permanently survive in institutions that manage complexity, government departments in particular. He said so in a 2014 paper called The Hollow Men II: Some refl ections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction. That was a long time ago but in his most recent blog post – January 2020 – he suggests that his 2014 musings are still relevant and that his complaints about how the British state makes decisions, which were “seen by pun- dit-world as a very eccentric view in 2014” are not so odd any more.
What did he say in 2014? He said: “An obvious thing that is desper- ately needed in Whitehall is the creation of a network of ‘libraries plus internal historians’ connected to departments’ analysis teams that could not only answer the question ‘did we already fail with X?’ but would also be able to make public, on proper websites, as much information as possible for researchers and the general public to examine.”
20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Journalist, Information Professional.
His view was not that libraries need equal treatment, they needed a much-improved status: “This is one of the few aspects of the civil service that, to me, obviously needs to be ‘permanent’ yet it is now neglected by a civil service desperate to maintain its permanence in many fi elds where it is not necessary.”
Cummings’ experience at the Department for Education was one practical example he used to support his argument. “The DfE destroyed its own library some time before 2010. It was a sign of how abysmal Whitehall has become that such things – and the much worse destruction of the Foreign Offi ce library – happen and nobody really cares. It is also abysmal at record-keeping. Partly because everybody can email everybody
January-February 2020
Dominic Cummings
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