From the Tories’ Thatcher fixation to Labour’s Blair fetish, ideas from the past are poisoning the political present

The pop culture of past generations weighs like a dark cloud on the youth of today. Teenagers may have their own subcultures but the mainstream is all nostalgia. The big films are sequels, remakes or long-running sagas. The most watched shows on Netflix are 90s sitcoms, or paeans to the past like Stranger Things. The main stage at Glastonbury is full of OAPs performing tribute acts to their youth. The top music story of 2024 is the return of Oasis, a band whose songwriter was born during the Wilson administration.

This is all a function of the internet, which makes the past ever-present in easily accessible form, leaving little space for the new or innovative. In a slightly more subtle way it’s doing the same thing to politics, with more severe consequences than Champagne Supernova being played incessantly on the radio.