In 1984, the English rock musician Robert Wyatt released a song in defense of the British miners’ strike. The track had a lengthy genesis. Having achieved renown with the cult band The Soft Machine, Wyatt underwent a public radicalization in the late 1970s, highlighted by his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain and an appearance on several trade union picket lines. A similar radicalism was detectable in his 1984 four-track EP The Age of Self, released on a four-track EP co-produced with the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band and the embattled trade unionists of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence unit. Wyatt’s track was a fierce indictment of Thatcherism and its egoist gospel, coupled with a sensitive critique of recent trends in left-wing thought. The song opened with the following lines:

They say the working class is dead, we’re all consumers now
They say that we have moved ahead, we’re all just people now
They say we need new images to help our movement grow
They say that life is broader based, as if we didn’t know

The targets of Wyatt’s complaint were clear enough. Code words such as “consumers,” “people,” and “images” stood out as aggressive retorts to recent calls from within the Labour Party to remodel it as a broad, “popular” coalition, capable of taking on the Thatcherite camp. After the latter achieved its first general election victory in 1979, figures such as Neil Kinnock and Peter Mandelson voiced hopes that Labourites would reorient themselves around a larger middle-class base and reach out to “common” rather than “working” people. A populist sensibility was in the air.