Of course they should not be destroyed. The question, in my mind, is whether they already have been. I don't think the fact that they do not explicitly say that they are not going to do so means that it will not be done. If they admit that they are going to be destroyed, they risk an outcry against it. Perhaps things are different in England, but if it were here, I would assume they were being destroyed.
I get the feeling that Archives are losing their sense of purpose. Here in Canada our national library and archives (all one organization) threw out all kinds of material a few years ago. Publicly, they claimed to have sold some of it and offered it to other libraries/archives, but I never heard them say they were throwing out valuable historical resources, which they did. This action followed the hiring of a national director who was neither an archivist nor a librarian, but a person with a business background - unprecedented.
Many of us have the impression that this decision was politically motivated. We have now soundly turfed out that government, but we don't get our valuable materials back, nor were they scanned. Gone forever, and it's as if they had never existed, as no trace remains in the electronic indexing. Poof! None of us even really know what-all was lost.
I am in possession of some photocopies of materials I searched out in one of our national libraries (which, itself, has been closed, although some materials transferred elsewhere). I now have what are probably the only copies in existence anywhere, as that library held the only extant originals and there are no microfilms. They are historically significant. A genuine chill went down my spine as I realized that although they had survived very well for almost 100 years and were in very good condition when I made my copies a few years ago, they have been obliterated and the only evidence of them is in references in academic articles - and some pages in my personal possession. I don't even know what to do with them. Where can one even donate them where they won't be thrown out again? Nowhere, it seems.
I find all of this quite alarming, especially because I do believe it was political. In this particular case I feel confident that the material was not offered to other libraries/archives because there is excellent reason to believe that one particular library would have been glad to receive it - and it's probably where it should have been in the first place.
