I don’t know if you watched the Labour party leadership debate, but I have spent more inspirational 90-minute periods waiting for dial-up internet to load, and that was in 1998, when all you got at the end of it was a search engine that looked as if it had been designed by a photocopier in conjunction with a hair slide. Which is, now I think of it, a pretty fair description of most of the leadership candidates, too.

So I’ve been joining alternative leftwing groups, hoping for bright new solutions to political ennui, but the most spectacular thing about most of them is the speed with which they descend into the People’s Front of Judea. Everyone polices everyone else’s language to decide whose self-identification is subjugating whom. While this has, I hope, led to greater inclusivity, it has also made it a full-time job to check you haven’t oppressed anybody before you press send on a small thought you just had about primary schools. Meanwhile, somewhere over there on another page of the internet, Rome burns.

Revolutionaries with an actual plan are thin on the ground, so I’m inspired to see that they might now be found in pop music: Taylor Swift and Charlotte Church, to be precise. If you are now groaning, unconvinced, then let me update you on what they are up to this month, in their different worlds. Swift, the 25-year-old multimillionaire from Nashville, one of the biggest stars in the world, has stood up to Apple and told them they can’t stream her music for free on its new service (they were not planning to pay artists during a three-month trial giveaway). She had already refused to let Spotify give away her music on similar grounds. “This is not about me,” she wrote in an open letter that made Apple change its plans overnight. “Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt.”

All right, so it’s not quite Nelson Mandela’s last stand against the bloody jaws of apartheid, but in an industry not know for its trade unions, Swift is the safe voice that can represent the collective without putting the individual at risk. These principles echo well beyond music, too: they teach a generation of young fans that, with no art to fill the machines, there can be no more machines, and perhaps no more art.

Then there is Charlotte Church, who last week made a speech at the anti-austerity demo in London, described as the biggest rally in Britain for several years. The child with the voice of an angel is now the adult with the voice of sanity, and millions of people behind her. She spoke, to enormous cheers, about this country needing to save itself from “decades of yuppie rule”, and declared that the government wants to sell off our schools and hospitals. “And once it is done,” she added, “it will be very difficult to reverse. One aspect of this that really gets under my skin is that it’s all wrapped up in a proud-to-be-British package. I’m proud to be British because of our National Health Service, the welfare system and David Bowie. Not because of the union jack.”

It’s not just the politics that interest me here, it’s the death of cute. Swift was always in control of her own destiny, always wrote her own music, forged her own career – but she had to stay cute as a button, too. Church was a child star. Miley Cyrus had to kill off her own child incarnation, Hannah Montana, by the most adult means possible, with sex and drugs, but also with her own political awakening: Cyrus is now digging deep into LGBT rights and talking openly about her experience of gender, of not fitting the norms. It seems that cute is losing its appeal, to be replaced by substance, and arguments, and women with bigger, harder, stronger lives, all of which makes politics a bloody exciting place to be right now. Well, apart from the bits of it that involve actual politicians.