As the Party Conference season draws to a close, the disconnect between the politics of the Westminster bubble and the rest of us couldn’t be more obvious. Besuited figures, mostly men, addressing other besuited figures, mostly men, given huge chunks of airtime. All while party membership figures plummet and the great unsayable for the political class, that fewer and fewer can be bothered to vote at all scarcely gets a mention.
Stuart Hall was one of the founders of the 1950s British New Left. Decades later, he looked back in an autobiographical essay to explain why the New Left took popular culture seriously:
