“People feel too small to be heard”: Columnist Libby Purves tells Index fewer working class voices are being heard and wonders whether this contributed to Brexit

Columnist Libby Purves talks to Rachael Jolley about working-class stories not being reported any more and the effects on society

Local newspapers used to be a good way of finding out what the police are investigating

CREDIT: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

“WHAT STRIKES ME most is how close we were to the people on the patch, even when they were part of a national story,” said Times columnist Libby Purves of her first job at BBC Radio Oxford.

She explains how during the strikes at car manufacturer British Leyland the story was reported on the national news but she and her colleagues knew the assembly-line workers because they were their listeners.

“If the reason for yet another walkout was, in their view, being unfairly reported, they’d ring – or indeed turn up – and tell us so,” she said.

“In the drought of 1976, Thames Water carried on urging restrictions in our area well after the rain started to fall and the reservoirs filled, and we could argue the case for people who had rung in who were obediently still rationing baths and using vegetable water to wash the dog when there was no longer any need.

“My husband was up at Radio Humberside during the Cod War, and while ministers dominated the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, he was talking to skippers’ wives, not as a brief ‘colour’ vox pop, but in a proper, long argument and discussion. Talking with him, and other ex-local journalists, what comes out strongly is that the old working class, of all generations, got a lot of airtime and were listened to in a way they have not been now for decades. Reflecting on the Brexit vote, that seems significant.”

Purves, who has also been a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship political news programme Today, added: “The way news came in was different, too: court and council reporting – planning, housing, education, highways, finance – were the bread-and-butter of our newsroom, and in local government nobody seemed to have heard of PR or modern curating of news. You got right to the councillor or mayor responsible, whether it was a new shopping centre or a row over the fire service.

“In court reporting, the trust which locals put in known voices meant facts emerged which would be less likely to be confided [to] a national.

“Above all, reporters (and we featuremakers) spent a lot of time out and about – in my case, on an appalling moped.

“Nobody was enslaved to updating an online feed and, as it was radio, if a press release came in it didn’t just get rewritten – a voice had to be found to explain and justify it.”

A decline in local reporting, she feels, means “people feel less able to be in the conversation, raise their argument in proper detail: in other words, to count. Brexit is relevant here, I suspect.

“If local media haven’t enough resources to drill down and investigate in detail the possible local effect of some big national policy change or event, communities don’t have a chance to muster their objections fast enough,” she said. “People feel they’re too small to be heard.”

Why Should We Care About Local Journalism?

A walk down many high streets would once have brought you into contact with the local newspaper office, where you could drop in and speak to a reporter or the editor. Other reporters would cover local court cases. Now, many of those offices have gone the same way as local travel agents or post offices. To find the shrunken staffs that once sat in them, you often need to look to out-of-town “hubs” where reporters covering a range of areas work together. In some cases, the newspapers can be physically situated 20 or 30 miles from the towns they purport to represent. People aren’t stupid, they know this, and are aware a bond has been lost.

STEPHEN KHAN, editor of The Conversation UK, worked as a journalist on the Kilmarnock Standard, Scotland