Here is a written up version of my 2013 talk at The Rest is Noise Festival on politics and spirituality in the late 20thcentury. I’ve added a couple of thoughts as I went along based on contributions from the audience. One thing that really struck me throughout the other discussions during the day was the importance of the individual or ‘the self’, in both political and religious engagement through the period. The creative tension for me, was the ways in which Thatcherite individual resilience (Tebbit ‘getting on his bike’) and post-punk ‘any one can do it’ seemed to weave together.