There is a delicious anecdote that Harvey Mansfield, the legendary Harvard professor, loved to share when he lectured on Thomas Hobbes. In his masterpiece Leviathan, Hobbes famously posits that life without government would be “nasty, brutish, and short”. Unfortunately, having neither read nor listened with due care, one hapless undergraduate, Mansfield would recount, went on to write his term paper on how life without government would be “nasty, British, and short”.

This anecdote came to mind on the second anniversary of one of the worst cyberattacks in Britain. Back in October 2023, the computers of the British Library (BL) were taken over by hackers. When the BL rightly refused to pay the ransom they demanded, the hackers retaliated by destroying the management systems vital to marshalling the 170 million records under its care. To its credit, the BL immediately set about restoring services and subsequently published a frank report detailing how inadequate investments in technology had allowed this “cyber incident” to occur. In the meantime, its outstanding staff stepped up to help patrons trace items manually, serving as what one report described as “human computers”.

The real horror is that two years hence, the BL is yet to fully recover. Several catalogues, the very essence of a library, remain offline. A new library management system, which was due to be released this week, has been postponed because staff have gone on strike over inadequate pay. Meanwhile, the £6-7 million spent on necessary technological upgrades was reported to have depleted the BL’s reserves by 40%. Altogether, the........

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