The British left is losing. Labour is captured by the party’s centre and being dragged rightward. The extremes of identity politics and the woke strictures of the 2010s cannibalised the movement. The right exploited its opponents’ weaknesses and kept power for years. Trade unions are no longer a central locus of political organisation. The working class is atomised. Too much activism happens over phone screens. There is no going back to a pre-financial-crash world. Young people are disillusioned, “black-pilled” nihilists.
This is the world in 2025 according to the journalist-cum-pundit Ash Sarkar, as laid out in her debut book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. Given her desperate diagnosis, Sarkar, 32, was surprisingly cheery when we met at a Turkish café in Harringay, north London. It’s easy to see why Sarkar – a ventriloquist of Corbynism and senior editor at Novara Media, a non-profit, left-wing new-media outlet – is popular with her tribe. She is confident and articulate, and I suspect more shrewd than she is willing to reveal on first impression.
She is also a memetic thinker who speaks in internet vernacular. She tells me, in reference to a 2023 meme, that she thinks “about the Roman empire every day”; that her obsession with the Napoleonic Wars ranks among her “boy-coded” traits; that she is unfairly characterised as a “tofu-eating soy boy”. (The book is full of these asides too: “spoiler alert”, “come off it”, “good luck pal”.) At times, talking to Sarkar feels like talking to X.
Minority Rule opens with a polemic that, Sarkar told me, is an attempt to detail “all the ways in which people feel so profoundly alienated, and let down and f**ked over”. “We know deep down that something is wrong,” she writes. “Our material conditions – the pay in our pockets, the roof over our heads, the stuff that we buy, the services we rely on, the planet that sustains us – are getting worse.” As the world collapses around us, Sarkar suggests, the political right has turned the working majority against itself; it is time to reclaim leftish solidarity.
But how did we get here? Sarkar traces the decline of the left to the emergence of a “hyper-individualised form of identity politics” that elevated personal characteristics (race, gender, age) over the material and economic conditions of the group. Class has receded as the guiding principle for the left, replaced by unproductive culture wars. This was an own-goal, Sarkar argues: perverse “social incentives” (who is the most oppressed person in the room?) encouraged a movement already prone to infighting to self-immolate.
Take, for example, the book’s discussion of a yoga teacher who describes “white-led yoga spaces” to be “traumatising for people of colour”. Sarkar cites this as evidence of the worst excesses of the left’s “obsession with grievance”. “If being in an all-white yoga class is ‘traumatising’, then there are no suitable words to describe the experience of racialised police harassment” she writes. Or, as she put it more frankly to me: “You’re in a majority-white country, who do you think is going to be doing yoga?”
Here Sarkar is describing concept creep: the process by which words such as “trauma” get stretched out of proportion and come to describe a much broader array of phenomena than before. The left’s increasing sensitivity to perceived harm is a function of concept creep – a point made by both the Atlantic and the Observer in 2016, and several times over by several more people since.
Like a lot of Minority Rule, this idea might have been radical had it been expressed by her own side in 2017. But by 2025 – following the routing of the Democrats, the vibe shift symbolised by Trump, the retreat of identity politics – Sarkar’s account of how the left lost its way is not original.
Ash Sarkar, who calls herself a “frustrated idealist”, was born in Tottenham and now lives in Harringay, north London. Her grandmother is from Caledonian Road; her mother, Wood Green – both also in north London. Her strength of feeling for Tottenham Hotspur surpasses her obsession with the Napoleonic Wars.
She had an unusually political upbringing. Her grandmother and mother were “anti-racist activists”. “Everyone in my family works in child protection,” she joked. “It [was] like being raised in the Mafia but everyone’s doing active listening.” Her stepfather comes from a trade union family. As a teenager, she used to bunk off school to go to anti-war protests. Her two biggest intellectual influences (or “the two men whose thumbprints are all over this book”, as she put it to me) are Karl Marx and Stuart Hall. She is related to Pritilata Waddedar, an Indian revolutionary. “My great-great-aunt was a terrorist,” Sarkar wrote of her in 2018. “She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I’m proud of it.”
After completing undergraduate and master’s degrees in English literature at University College London, Sarkar joined the pundit class. She lectured at Anglia Ruskin University and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Her biggest break came in 2018 when she faced down Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain. Morgan – who, in the spirit of bonhomie, she interviewed for her book – accused Sarkar of hero-worshipping Barack Obama. “I’m literally a communist, you idiot!” she retorted, in a moment destined for virality. (Sarkar told me she is more communist now.)
She is now perhaps the most prominent figure on what remains of the Corbynite left. In 2019 she was close to the project, and admits that she made a mistake in pushing for a more economically radical Labour manifesto (a four-day week, universal basic income) for that year’s election. “Wrong!” she says today. “I was surrounded by too many people who are like me.” She believes she got it wrong on Brexit, too: “[My] biases were to overly emphasise the opinions of people who resembled me in terms of educational status.”
Sarkar and her Novara Media colleagues were once foot soldiers in the identity-politics revolution of the 2010s. In 2016, two weeks on from the Brexit referendum, they produced a short documentary, The Unbearable Whiteness of Brexit. Now, they condemn identity politics’ excesses. Why did it take so long for this wing of the left to note the absurdities of the movement, especially when they were so apparent to those on the right?
“It takes a while because you have to experience some of the limitations of a way of looking at the world for yourself.” More than that, “we had a degree of political momentum with us because it felt like, finally, after all these years of austerity, there was a common-sense coalescing around ‘austerity bad, need to tax wealthy people, no more adventurist warfare’. And so, when you’re in the ascendancy, it’s easy to ignore or close your eyes to some of your own weaknesses. When you’re in a high-conflict situation and you experience a sense of threat, it’s very difficult to be self-critical.”
Ash Sarkar’s change of heart might be a cynical attempt to capitalise on the anti-woke reactionary moment, but it could also be a product of genuine contrition and evolution. “Part of it is being able to listen,” Sarkar said, “which maybe when I was younger and in my twenties I wasn’t smart enough to do.”
“It’s not enough to say the other side are winning. We also have to say ‘and we are losing’.” She is right. But the Corbynite left could have reached these conclusions years ago.
[See also: Sharone Lifschitz: “On 7 October, my father saw his life’s work going up in flames”]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World