Just over a week ago, I got a message from a grassroots group in the east of England. “Can you investigate this?” it said. “We’re hitting similar brick walls to the Post Office campaign.”
There was a link to a local ITV report, broadcast two weeks before Christmas. When I watched it, I was dumbfounded, but also aware that it was about a set of very familiar British themes: threadbare public services, a managerial class that seems to constantly resist accountability, thousands of people whose lives have been ruined – and things that should have long since broken into the national conversation but have so far been largely ignored. In this case, what has happened has been doggedly and brilliantly covered in the Eastern Daily Press, and on local broadcast news – but its coverage in national outlets has tended to be muted and sporadic.
