A great idea if you live in a relatively wealthy community which has a sense of pride, place and a desire to better itself. As we're talking about the entire country of the UK, that idea is going straight down the toilet.
You don't need a wealthy community. This city is not only poor, it's been dead broke for years. I doubt there's a wealthy community in the city, and I know it wasn't local wealthy people who made our library what it is. Ordinary patrons gave what they could, and went all over creation soliciting. From Bill Gates, who was convinced to give the library more new computers and software than you can believe, to everyone one in the country we could find an address for.
The patrons also do volunteer work, have sales of all sorts, etc., and the result was a library better than most big cities have.
It really doesn't take all that many people, but it does take time and dedicated people. A new, greatly expanded library was not cheap, but that's what happened. We didn't just keep the old one open, we had a new one built from the ground up. I think it really takes no more than two or three or four people to get the ball rolling.
I guess my feeling is that a library that doesn't have people willing to fight for it, willing to put in the time and effort and money it takes to keep it open, probably isn't wroth saving. I don't blame politicians for not wanting to give more tax money, I blame patrons for not wanting to work hard enough to save what they think matters.