Local is Lekker* March 2026

You’d have thought it would be an easy home run, right? Even if the owner of your local bookshops give you dismissive and distrustful side-eye at the mention of your ‘new book’, you’d have thought the local library would be a shoo-in. Surely they’ll just slip the free copy of the book you’re offering them into their ‘local authors’ section and get on with their day.

Well, that’s where you’re wrong.

See, it turns out the local library does not have ANY discretion about what books it does and does not put on its (admittedly limited) shelves. That decision, like so many in our increasingly centralised world, gets made ‘up the chain’. In this case, the relatively newly formed North Yorkshire County Council.

And, to be very blunt, they were rude to the point of dismissive, disdainful, disrespectful, even.

They made it clear they had no interest in putting my book on any of their shelves, let alone considering the advantages of a ‘local authors’ section for a local library, catering to local people, in a very local small market town.

Apart from taking no small measure of personal offence at that casual dismissal, I also think it’s indicative of a bigger problem, a problem that encompasses both commerce and community.

Yes, the internet has (at least in some ways) offered a sort of democratisation of content. Technology and different digital channels make it increasingly easy for someone to make and even ‘distribute’ their ‘art’. Be it Spotify, YouTube or various other creative outlets, it’s increasingly easy for people to make art and offer it up for consumption, affirmation and perhaps even fiduciary reward.

And yes - starting with Napster and racing quickly towards the various digital streaming services by way of a bay filled with pirates – this has substantially changed the game for many of the old-school gate-keepers. Some of them have not survived, some of them barely cling to relevance, some have had to pivot hard and some are simply done.

But in that process, a whole new type of gate-keeper have emerged and, in a world where everyone can theoretically create content, how can anyone stand out, let alone make a living?

Don’t believe me? Ask a touring musician how much harder it is to make money now, and how much deeper the new gate-keepers insist in putting their hands in the artist’s pockets. Still unconvinced? Take a look at how many of the pioneers of YouTube content creation have given up or are busy trying to pivot to a new business model. When even the early adopters of this new reality are struggling to survive, how can even old school broadcasting big beasts not be nervously considering their own extinction?

And then we get to Government…

I’ve long been of the opinion that the single best and arguably most important part of Government is the Village Council. Okay, so they are almost never included in Strategic Arms Limitation talks and there is very little they can do to offer assistance to the brave citizens of Ukraine and the horrifically abused people of the Gaza strip. But, they are local, they are known, they are part of the community they both represent and reflect. And that doesn’t just mean there is human accountability, it also means the decisions they make for the community they serve are decisions that will also affect the place where they live.

Frankly, if the place where you ‘govern’ is also the place where you eat then you are far less likely to take a massive public shit.

I’m no mathematician, so I can’t offer a formula for distance v accountability, but clearly, the farther away the decision maker is from the effects of their decisions, the less likely they are to feel any real skin in the game.

This is why the new High Speed Rail Link out of London will now no longer travel as far as Manchester. It’s why there are so few routes east to west and why all roads really do almost literally lead to the capital. It’s why the notorious A64 from York to Scarborough remains under-developed and over-used. Were it a road between London and Brighton it would not be so poorly served because it would be orders of magnitude more likely to be used by the people making the choices about where to spend OUR money.

And yes, travel infrastructure is very easy to identify and discuss, but these same systemic failures are reflected across our society, where choices made inside the M25 are either to the benefit of people living inside that particular circle of hell, or to the detriment of everyone outside it, all in some kind of inverse but obvious proportion.

One under discussed aspect of The Gate Keeper Effect is the proximity of the keeper to the gate. When they have to look you in the eye before denying you entry that’s a very different interaction to when they’re pushing a button from a remote location in a distant postcode.

All this to say, it would have been really lekker** if my book was in my local library, right?

*South African expression used to encourage people to support local art and products.

**Lekker, Afrikaans for nice. Lekkergoed/Lekkers = Candy

Update! March 2026