Baroness Fox reviews Ash Sarkar's 'Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War'
4 min read
I tried to be generous when Ash Sarkar came out against divisive identity politics… but then I read her book
In pre-publication interviews for her book Minority Rule, Novara Media’s sassy, left-wing firebrand Ash Sarkar came out against her own tribe’s embrace of divisive identitarian politics. It was surprising because Ms Sarkar has been one of the best-known pundits casting aspersions against those of us who made similar criticisms. Some on the receiving end of her vicious tongue-lashings were understandably irritated by this apparent volte-face. I tried to be generous over “one lost sinner who repenteth”. But then I read the book.
I wanted to like it. I too was “literally a communist” and agree we need to be “brutally honest” about what’s been happening on the left, which has promoted identitarian orthodoxies such as “an inverse hierarchy, where those most recognised as victims wield the most power”. She criticises the subjectivity of lived experience whereby “we don’t speak of the truth, but my truth” and amusingly asks her self-absorbed, grievance-mongering peers who treat sweary words as violence, “What hope of taking on the state?” But in reality, she lets the left – and herself – off the hook.
The book’s conspiratorial thesis is that right-wing commentators and politicians have used scaremongering moral panics to fracture the working class into warring identity groups. This argument robs ordinary people of any agency, assuming that they are easily whipped up into “a frenzy of racist… loathing” by the tabloid press. Unoriginally, it’s The Sun wot done it. Bizarrely, Sarkar says that the turning point for this was the 2011 riots, which she romanticises as an “explosive” expression of “class consciousness”. What?
It is a tract of despair by a defeated Corbynista
That nihilistic outbreak of youngsters trashing their own communities is presented as “working-class people… identifying with each other rather than against each other and directing their rage at racial injustice and economic inequality”. Tell that to the Sikh and Turkish businesses defending their property. Sarkar’s evidence that this lawlessness was political is based on a few rioters describing looting as “getting our taxes back”. A random man from Tottenham recalls: “I still to this day don’t class it as a riot… It was a protest.”
This invented “uprising of Britain’s youth” apparently “terrified elites” who then divided the working class along lines of race. She whinges that this allowed an opportunistic right to champion this victimised “white working class” and displace “the political left from the once traditional territory of working-class advocacy... [casting] them as the baddies”. But this shows the book’s weakness: a reluctance to take any responsibility. In reality, if anyone is responsible for highlighting a white working class and divisively racialising communities, it’s the left that this book is supposed to be critiquing. And she refuses to own it.
She’s right that the language of racial thinking is making a comeback; an ugly ethno-nationalism on the fringe right is emerging. However, the identitarian left laid the groundwork not least by demonising people as “privileged” for their (white) skin colour, or “racist” if they raised concerns about the impact of mass immigration on community cohesion.
The book is an easy read, and you might enjoy the gossip on the Lobby and her insider take on young politicos’ social media worldview. But actually, it is a tract of despair by a defeated Corbynista. She concludes: “We’ve lost faith in our ability to change things.” But such despondency is because she has missed grassroots action that has changed things – most notably the democratic, working-class revolt of Brexit.
I want to cheer her up by pointing to the exciting gains won by tens of thousands of women who’ve taken on institutional power to fight the erosion of their rights. But Sarkar’s identitarian prejudice against gender critical activism makes her blind to such change-makers. Instead, sadly, she resorts to exactly the sort of ‘Nazi transphobe’ insults that make adventures in the culture war so toxic.
Baroness Fox of Buckley is a non-affiliated peer
Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War
By: Ash Sarkar
Publisher: Bloomsbury
