MY DEN, my safe space, is the room where I work and/or play jazz music most days.

I have a laptop, my saxophones and guitar in the room but the greatest thing is that I am surrounded by my books. My wife Kate sometimes ribs me about just how many books I do have — I have never counted them. But she sometimes says that I have too many.

I beg to differ. As far as I’m concerned the problem is never that I have too many books. The real issue is a lack of bookshelves!

It was never like this for me. Growing up as a child the only few books in the house were from the Christian scriptures and the Bible itself.

The only other books around the house were books we were required to read for school and those that we borrowed from the library.

To be honest, at a young age my biggest interest was football rather than reading. My brother was always the biggest reader in our family. But all of us — my brother, sister and I, had access to our trusty tickets for the local library.

What I didn’t know at the time was that everyone living in Britain is legally entitled to borrow books for free from public libraries. How great is that!

Everyone can read any book they have in stock and now — with the technology available — can have equal access to a world of information and ideas, whether bogus or not.

They also get the expertise, skill and professionalism of librarians anywhere in the country.

Often when I travel the country for work my “office” of choice is the local library of wherever I am.

Nobody ever asks who I am, what I’m doing there or any other questions. All I need to do is find a spot to sit and write about whatever is happening in the world that day.

Coventry Central Library. Credit: Libraries Taskforce/flickr/CC

The Public Libraries Act 1850 gave councils the power to establish free public libraries.

But way before that, in 1653, Chetham Library in Manchester was founded and is the oldest surviving public library in Britain. Something that I didn’t know when I lived in the city during the mid to late 1980s.

The library was built with the legacy of a local textile merchant, Humphrey Chetham, who stated in his will that all future librarians “should require nothing of any man that cometh into the library.”

And that remains the same today – for any man, woman and child.

When I lived in Manchester and really only knew the people that I worked with — and not all of them particularly wanted to spend time with me — the library in the city centre was one of my default places to go.

I met new friends such as James Baldwin and Angela Davis through sitting in that library. I didn’t know them in person of course but they joined my circle of close friends and teachers.

I had actually come across my all-time favourite book, the Autobiography of Angela Davis, by chance a few years earlier as I walked past a second-hand bookshop in a back street of Walsall and spotted the afro on the front cover in the front window sitting next to Seize the Time by Bobby Seale.

I bought them both for hardly anything and still have both my original copies.

But in those times when I didn’t have the money to do a whole lot, libraries were a place I could just go to be.

I never had to pay to go in. I didn’t have to buy anything to stay in. I didn’t even have to read if I didn’t want to. I could just go and be and if I didn’t bother anyone nobody would bother me.

Aside from home and my beloved Holte End at Villa Park there really is no place that I would rather be than in a library or bookshop anywhere in the world — in Paris The Red Wheelbarrow or Shakespeare and Company or maybe Strand in New York or Toppings in Edinburgh or so many more.

In these times of cuts to public services we must make sure that we do not allow our amazing libraries to become an easy saving for councils to make.

Not only must we keep them free but we must make sure that they are genuinely accessible to people. By that I mean making sure that there are enough physical buildings for people to use and enjoy.

But we must also not hesitate in calling out those politicians, such as on the other side of the sacred burial ground commonly known as the Atlantic Ocean, who seek to decide what we can and can’t read.

The banning of books, that began before the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency, is a warning to us all.

The erasing of the horrors of the genocide that took place against indigenous peoples of what became known as the Americas as well as the enslavement of Africans could easily be a prelude to similar acts on this side of the Atlantic as authoritarianism rises.

The continuation of libraries and the right to stock them with a broad range of books is just one of the vital means that we have of reminding us of the dangers of tyranny.

It is always one of the means that we have of revealing how working-class and peasant communities across the globe have resisted authoritarianism and built socialism.

Libraries and books more generally should be seen as a vital tool for socialists to help us to build a better world.

Every single step of human progress has been made possible through our ability not just to acquire knowledge, but to store, share and learn from it.

We have to resist any individual or institution that attempts to create barriers to our ability to access the knowledge we need for our education and for us to make progress.

Arguments that we all now have access to information at our fingertips on our phones or laptops via the internet are as reactionary as they are bogus. It recreates the notion that someone’s ability to be able to pay — for a laptop, mobile phone and the internet — is a determinant of whether or not you will be able to access knowledge or to simply enjoy a book for the sake of it.

I have the resources to buy books from bookshops or to send for them online, although not through Amazon which I refuse to use. Not everyone is able to do that.

So this is no sentimental piece about the value of books in general or libraries in particular. This is a warning!

An attack on either is a direct attack on the working class and our access to information, culture and pleasure. We must stand up for our libraries and our right to read the books of our choice.

I think we should also champion left-wing book clubs and reading groups where we can share the ideas from the wonderful books that are out there for us to enjoy.

Some of these books may just help to spark that idea that moves us from enjoyment and theory to the action necessary to build a new world.