The dispute over pay at this great national institution gets to the heart of our misplaced priorities

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

The British Library is our great national home of cultural workers. We go there to read and research, to learn and to grow, to write and to think, to inspire and create. Facilitating our work is a great army of library staff, who are also cultural workers. Without them, the library does not function, the books do not get read, the culture does not come to pass. And how are they treated? According to their union, they are offered pay deals so dire that many of them work multiple jobs and live in substandard housing. Seventy one per cent of respondents to a union survey find their salary insufficient to meet basic needs. Some workers report mental and physical health deterioration as a consequence of these poverty wages. When a massive cyber-attack on the library results in a major disruption of the service they are able to offer, they’re left on the frontline, to be shouted at by the very patrons they are attempting to serve. And when they then try to ask for a pay increase that is at least in line with inflation, they are told there is no money, while some of the six-figure-salaried executives are eligible for five-figure bonuses. One of the other things we used to think about this country was that it had a bone-deep sense of fairness. Does any of that sound fair?

Zadie Smith is a novelist. This is an edited transcript of a speech that she gave on a picket line outside the British Library on Friday 7 November

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.

Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

Public life is a minefield and the best and brightest just don’t want to know. How convenient for foes of the most trusted news organisation in the world

Listen, I hate to ruin a yarn wall but I don’t think it’s at all helpful to start framing the current crisis at the BBC as a giant conspiracy or coup by dark rightwing forces, and get stuck in the weeds of that. The fact is, the three mistakes that form the bulk of Michael Prescott’s explosive leaked memo about impartiality – the Panorama edit, issues with coverage of the transgender issue and bias in the BBC Arabic service – happened and are bad. Given their spectacular fallout and the highest-level scalps that have been claimed, the opportunity to now deal with them might as well be taken by what is, let’s not forget, the most trusted news organisation in the world.

There is no news organisation in the United States that reaches more than 25% of people in a week. BBC News reaches 74% of UK adults in a week. There is vastly more distrust of news brands in the US. We in Britain live in a country with a far less polarised news market than almost anywhere else, in a world where 70% of people don’t even have a free press. This is great, whatever you might be told by Nigel Farage – a political leader who’s gunning to be the next PM but still presents a nightly current affairs show on GB News like that isn’t a massive conflict of interest and we live in Russia or something. Thanks for dialling in, Mr Ethics!

How do you plan for an event whose timing is unknown? For residents of Tofino on Vancouver Island the threat is distant but signs of preparedness are everywhere

Justin Goss was in the shower when he first heard the piercing wail of a nearby tsunami early-warning siren. Still dripping wet, he threw on clothes, grabbed his dog and rushed to the truck. The pair made it 3 metres and no further.

“The whole parking lot across the street was jammed up. It was complete gridlock within three minutes,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, this is not good.’”

Sport’s famous rivalry began in 1877 and since then 853 men have featured in Australia v England Tests. But who are the best? Our four-day countdown starts here with Nos 100-71

• Read about the 51 judges and our methodology here

Relatives fear the move is part of ‘the same virus affecting the US’, as historians and politicians say it coincided with Trump’s DEI purge

A white marble cross marks the final resting place of Julius W Morris, private first class in the US army, who died in April 1945.

But at the cemetery where he lies in Margraten, a village in the south of the Netherlands, a new battle has begun over the quiet removal of two display panels about African American soldiers, like Morris.

Exclusive: No 10 said to be in ‘full bunker mode’ over fears of attempt to oust him after budget or May local elections

• Thin majorities and chaotic strategy push Labour MPs toward regime change

Downing Street has launched an extraordinary operation to protect Keir Starmer amid fears among the prime minister’s closest allies that he is vulnerable to a leadership challenge in the wake of the budget.

Starmer’s most senior political aides warned that any attempt to oust the prime minister over tanking poll ratings would be a “reckless” and “dangerous” move that could destabilise the markets, international relationships and the Labour party.

Former prince seeks to dissolve Dragons’ Den-style startup competition and his innovation company

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has applied to shut down some of his last remaining business interests including the Dragons’ Den-style startup competition Pitch@Palace Global.

A document announcing the application to dissolve the firm was filed with Companies House on Tuesday, signed by its sole director, Arthur Lancaster.

Boris Johnson’s appointee is accused of pushing claims of institutional bias at the corporation after shock resignations

MPs and BBC staff members have called for Robbie Gibb to be removed from the corporation’s board as outgoing director general Tim Davie hit out at the “weaponisation” of criticisms of the broadcaster.

In an online meeting with Davie, staff questioned the position of Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief, who was appointed during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister.

Groups from Italy and elsewhere alleged to have paid Serb soldiers to shoot Sarajevo residents during siege

Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so that they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by constant shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996 in what was the longest siege in modern history, after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia.