As we approached the last days of the election campaign, the East Anglia Bylines editorial team met as usual to discuss the likely schedule of news stories in the days ahead. The imminent election itself would be tumultuous, of course, with countless stories to be told. But beyond the results, what then?
A great deal of our coverage has inevitably and inexorably been of the vicissitudes of the last government. But the new government won’t have had time to make much news, good or bad. So there loomed the possibility that we would have little to write about.
East Anglia Bylines is non-party political: we support all progressive parties. In the weeks and months ahead we will no doubt at times be critical of them all. Support for both EU membership and proportional representation is in our DNA. So given the Labour government’s position on both, it seems likely we won’t always see eye to eye. But we make no assumptions.
A change in culture and a need to recalibrate
However, we are all in new territory. The old paradigm of how politics works, established over the past 14 years, is fortunately no longer appropriate. We need to recalibrate. The fascination will lie in realising quite how.
Whatever success or otherwise we see in the government’s plans, we know the culture will change. That in turn will change the nature of the news, and the characters who appear in it. East Anglia had been a traditional Conservative fiefdom, and all those years of continuity produced a number of MPs whose careers led, often bizarrely, to a place at the cabinet table. But most have gone, and those who remain are now powerless, out of government and – but for the eccentricities of those vying for their party leadership – eventually out of the public eye.
They are replaced by unknowns, new candidates from Labour and Liberal Democrats, a few Reformers and even a Green. Many of them never expected to get beyond the status of candidate, hoping probably for a decent second place.
Hope lies with all those new MPs
Instead, here they are, sworn in as actual members of parliament. Once they find their feet (and their offices, and their way round the Gormenghast-like Palace of Westminster), their responsibilities for the immediate future at least will be confined to their own constituencies. (And of course, voting as the whips instruct them.)
But gradually they will make their reputations: as campaigners, orators, TV talking heads, or hard-working champions of their constituency. Some will no doubt never be heard at all. They will shape our perceptions, though perhaps there is something else, something even beyond culture.
Perhaps our whole understanding of politics will have to change. There are many people, married with kids, with a mortgage and halfway through their careers, who have consciously known only a Conservative government, and who may find it difficult to envisage what running a country ought to be like.
Perhaps a government that feels on our side
For them, and all of us, an increasingly grinding existence has been caused by threadbare public services and the awareness that what we used to know as security is increasingly in peril. Almost any of us could fall through the cracks. To envisage government as largely benign, as on our side, if sometimes incompetent or cynical or partisan or which does things we hate, is a right of which we have been deprived for far too long.
We at Bylines look forward to writing about it, though pylons and Brexit and the need for proportional representation and to renationalise the water industry are all likely to be with us for some time to come.
