How happy does it make you when you hear your library will be closed to save money? Very happy, because iPads have made it completely redundant? Moderately satisfied, because you prefer Waterstone's and a nice cup of coffee? Or indifferent, because, let's face it, something's got to go and does anyone really still use them? Soon, Mr Cameron's happiness project may help councils to establish whether libraries do, as philanthropists once believed, have something important to offer communities or whether, as many authorities have concluded, the contribution of this service to general well-being is so negligible as to make it a prime candidate for cuts.
Of course, for the almost 250 libraries already earmarked for closure, their role in the happiness supply chain is probably irrelevant. By the time experts have established that, where the alleviation of ignorance, illiteracy, isolation, helplessness, unemployment, infirmity, boredom, neglect and poverty are concerned, libraries do, after all, offer something culturally irreplaceable, they will be gone. It is becoming clear that Mr Cameron's government will do nothing to protect them.
Instead, in a triumph of decentralisation, the scale of library cuts will depend upon local levels of councillor-philistinism. Or local engagement. In his Hugo Young lecture last week, Nick Clegg objected to the way "opponents of localism brandish the phrase 'postcode lottery' to dramatise differences in provision between areas. But it is not a lottery when decisions about provision are made by people who can be held to democratic account. That is not a postcode lottery – it is a postcode democracy."
Thus, readers in Oxfordshire are to lose almost half their libraries next year, while Cambridgeshire cuts its service by a quarter. In Leeds, where I once spent every Saturday morning in the library, there are democratically accountable plans to axe 20 out of 53, with closures including areas with high unemployment. In North Yorkshire, the council wants to close 24. London is likely to lose one third, with Lewisham going for five out of 12, while all of Hillingdon's survive.
In Gloucestershire, where a scattered population depends heavily on small libraries, the Conservative leader, Mark Hawthorne, has constructed a model of democratic destruction. Rural taxpayers will lose all seven mobile libraries at the same time that the council, using one ruse or another, condemns a further 18 libraries out of the existing 43; this amounts to 43% cuts in libraries, against a general, council target of 28%. One compensation, the council tells residents, will be a "24/7 virtual library service" – a boon to all the regular users who, like huge numbers nationally, rely on libraries and their staff to get online.
In an experiment that could have been designed to test Cameron's "big society" ambitions, 11 of Gloucestershire's discarded libraries, one of which attracts 177,000 visits a year, are to be offered to volunteers at peppercorn rents, the suggestion being that if people really care about a library, even in a disadvantaged area, they will run and fund it themselves. "They end up being a lot better than when the county council was running them," Hawthorne told the local paper. "I think people are excited about the idea of running their own libraries in the way they want to run them." Could he possibly think wrong?
In another model example of the big society at work, his proposal is furiously opposed by an existing community group, Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries. This is not merely because they want librarians who have been trained to run libraries, a job that involves helping other citizens input highly personal information into computers as well as recommending and ordering books, supporting literacy, hosting community groups, storytelling, helping with homework, dealing with the lonely, needy or difficult individuals who rely on the places in ways that vast chunks of the supposedly squeezed middle, as well as prosperous county councillors, will never know.
Lauren Smith, a spokesperson for another volunteer group, Voices for the Library, points out that it is the very people who do not use libraries "whose voices are loudest".
Without libraries, another campaigner predicts, many of the uneducated, unemployed and otherwise forgotten former users will end up needing much costlier help, further down the line, inside job centres, doctors' surgeries, advice centres, housing offices. But a more pressing problem is that "community-run" can only, where it is divorced from the prevailing library service, be a euphemism for permanently trashed.
Supposing every devolved library were to be taken over by a group which was, by chance, composed of kindly, discreet book-lovers with no family commitments, willing to travel and with a gift for incessant fundraising and building maintenance, there would still be no way customers – or beneficiaries – could depend upon it. How do users complain when the library is shut during advertised opening hours?
In Swindon, the Walcot library was handed over to a charitable group in 2009 and has already closed at weekends. "The reality is we have a set number of people who are our core of volunteers," said the charity chairman. "I'm not prepared to work them to the point where we start to lose them."
Gloucestershire council would rather refer its critics to community efforts in Buckinghamshire, where, as Private Eye reported, the council is planning to junk – or democratise – 14 libraries, including Roald Dahl's inspiration in Great Missenden: "From then on, every afternoon, as soon as her mother had left for bingo, Matilda would toddle down to the library."
Where they get off the ground, however briefly, community-run libraries obviously enjoy better prospects in affluent places like Buckinghamshire. But even here, it cannot be long before volunteers realise that this is not like taking over the village shop. Volunteers are colluding with any council that hopes to pass off sporadic access to its abandoned books as part of a "comprehensive and efficient library service", provided in accordance with the 1964 Public Libraries Act.
Still, having attacked Andy Burnham for "ignoring his responsibilities as secretary of state" (for procrastinating over proposed library closures in the Wirral), the libraries minister, Ed Vaizey, will not want to countenance this story of intellectual and social dereliction. Not now. "During economic challenges, people need the library service more than ever," he rightly said, after taking over.
But campaigners' letters to Vaizey at the DCMS have failed to move him. Where next? "While it is local authorities' responsibility to provide libraries," Vaizey once said, "the act very clearly lays responsibility for ensuring a good service at the culture secretary's door."
So that would be Jeremy Hunt's. Instead of presiding over neglect, library volunteers might want to organise and break it down. Metaphorically, of course.