Last week Dorset’s county councillors voted by a whisker for a cut in funding which will, in time, lead to the loss of small libraries across the whole county.

Everyone knows the county council is strapped for money but it wasn’t to save money that my village and eight other mainly rural communities will lose their libraries and their valued librarians.

The reason for their loss is quite simple – our councillors lost their nerve.

These libraries could have been saved at no extra cost. Cutting off their funding won’t save an extra penny.

There was a choice that would have achieved all the necessary eco-nomies and saved the libraries.

But by 21 votes to 20 our craven councillors chose to believe the scare stories they were being fed.

They voted for closure because of a warning that there may be more cuts to come.

Not that there will be: just that there might be.

Twenty years ago, when I worked at County Hall, letters the council sent out bore the county’s coat of arms and its defiant motto ‘Who’s a’feared?’ I can see why the council now has different headed paper. Now it’s in the hands of people who have lost that old fighting spirit. Our leaders now are like fearsome children, frightened of shadows.

Mike Chaney, Chairman of the Friends of Puddletown library and spokesman of Ad Lib (the association of friends of Dorset libraries), Puddletown