THE death of Jeremy Hardy last week left two worlds, that of satire and that of the political left in Britain, far poorer. It seems a useful moment to reflect on the shift in where those worlds cross over in the last two decades.

Fifteen years ago I did my GCSE English coursework on Hardy’s documentary, “Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army,” and in my head he remains a part of those years, at the beginning of the century, when so many of my generation were working out their politics to a backdrop of the “war on terror.”

His own frenetic revulsion at the injustices he saw around him fit with the time. Above all I remember a range of voices from comedy that challenged the powerful; the superbly crafted dialogues of John Bird and John Fortune, the sleazy, surreal darkness of Monkeydust, the raw anger sheathed in sarcasm of Charlie Brooker (before he got his happily ever after).

I devoured the News Quiz and the Now Show every Friday, never missed Have I Got News For You, dragged mates to go see Fahrenheit 9/11. They seemed so clever the people on screen and on the radio as they shot down the hypocrisies of New Labour, mocked the social backwardness of the Tories and railed against the American empire. It all seemed so righteous.

A few weeks ago I listened to Radio 4 comedy and, well, I think Jake Yapp has put it best. “A contrived morass of puns and tired observations … all the subtlety of a snooker ball smashing into a row of teeth.” I winced through a few minutes then switched it off. Was it always this smug, condescending and self-referential? (“Yes!” came the bellowed reply of readers of this paper.)

To hear songwriter Mitch Benn comparing Jeremy Corbyn, the sandled, vegetarian, jam-maker, to Pol Pot, felt akin to what many Smiths fans feel when they read Morrissey’s latest political garglings. You catch yourself wondering whether this was always there in the bits you enjoyed. Were the people I’d thought sophisticated as a youngster just, as Peter Hitchens castigated Stephen Fry, “A stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is?”

There is almost certainly a class element to which voices get heard in that setting. The re-Footlightisation of British comedy mirrors the movement in music and acting in Britain, how austerity, the removal of arts education from schools and the slashing of youth services have cut off certain professions to all except those whose parents can underwrite them while they’re discovered.

Yet in many cases it’s the same comedians, producers and satirists producing content now as were 15 years ago. Perhaps they’ve changed. But rather I think it is the case that the world has changed around them.

The New Labour years provided the perfect emotional and material position for successful people who had their formative youth in the 1980s. The Tories, the cultural enemy, were gone, relegated to obscurity. The Yanks had a stupid president we could make fun of. New Labour was “intensely relaxed” about the rich in a way that didn’t cause any awkwardness when chatting at the school gates.

And yet the outrages of the Blair years — ID cards, tuition fees, Iraq, provided these desperate, romantic causes to be railed against. And the late Charlie Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats provided the perfect vehicle for this, as shown in the seats where the Lib Dems broke through in 2005 — Bristol West, Manchester Withington, Cambridge.In Scotland the SNP, which took the Scottish project that was New Labour and just did it better, made major advances in 2007 on essentially the same platform. None of it seemed to risk an actual, Conservative government. Until, of course, it did.

The point of voting Lib Dem from the left prior to 2010 was never having to say you’re sorry. That disappeared in the rose garden and has not returned. And yet the predicted effect of 2015, of an Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper-led Labour Party that capitulated further, didn’t arise. Instead, the disparate, long-broken pieces of the British left came together and took control of the main opposition party in Britain.

This was not in the script. The point of the British left, in the minds of Britain’s cultural establishment, is to lose, but lose well, in a very British sense. To be the conscience of the country, advocating, earnestly and ineffectually, on behalf of the poor and needy, and allowing small-l liberals to feel a passing solidarity with us. But it is certainly not to do anything that might upset their lives. As Frank Turner put it, “Be 1905, but not 1917.” Above all, it is not to do anything so crass as to make political calculations that might lead to a victory, or craft a platform based on economic reconstruction rather than their own shibboleths.

The resolute caution and quiet proceduralism of the Labour leadership over this country’s departure from the European Union is the site of much of this anger. How dare, how dare, the leader of the British left not validate the righteousness of their cause? How dare he imply that the decade of grinding, lethal austerity that they sat on their hands through was uppermost in his mind, rather than the constitutional relationship with a trading bloc? Why does Corbyn not realise, in this age of managerialism, that his job is to demonstrate pointlessly outside the halls of power, lose, and make way for someone else to take us back to the “normal” of 2013?

The revelation of this divide, previously covered over, explains in part why so much of the fury of the campaigns for a further referendum have been turned on the leader of a parliamentary minority. It is a dawning realisation that those who campaigned against war, destitution and iniquity actually meant it. We actually thought, and think, we can change the nature of British society, not merely march for marching’s sake. We’re not prepared to lose any more. A socialist government in a major industrialised country of the West is possible in our lifetimes.

The British cognoscenti, comedians and columnists alike, are being forced to confront, finally, whether they are prepared to support a fundamental change in our society even at the cost of their own discomfort. “New Labour without the bombs” will not be on ballot. At the next election there will be a choice to be made. And to revisit a catchphrase of the early 2000s, “You’re either with us or against us.”

Sam Wheeler represents Piccadilly Ward on Manchester City Council.