The British left used to be a force to reckon with. Edward Heath’s government was famously felled by the miners in 1974 – the only instance in postwar European history when working-class power resulted in the overthrow of a ruling party. These days, however, the concept of the working class has an almost retro feel. Trade union membership has plummeted. Expressions of collective solidarity have likewise vanished. Disaffection has far from disappeared, only now it manifests in the form of petty crime and race riots.
In Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar blames the rightwing press for this shift. Thanks to tabloid agents provocateurs and their political creatures in Westminster, she says, the lower orders have abandoned class war for the culture wars. Accordingly, more and more of them spend their weekends not on the barricades but behind computer screens, fuming over small boats and gender ideology.
Sarkar’s thesis, that fears of minority rule of one kind (by the non-white and non-binary) serve to legitimate minority rule of another sort (by barons and billionaires), isn’t an earth-shattering observation, of course. As early as the 1890s, Friedrich Engels argued that the gullible and easily distracted working classes were conspiring in their own oppression; he called it “false consciousness”. All the same, she prosecutes her case with more panache and punchiness, more hilarity, than is usual from the dour quarters of British political punditry. Her hyper-caffeinated prose and acid observations are unquestionably a joy to read. Here she is on a leafy enclave in Islington: “Ocado delivery vans glided serenely through the streets … A moment of eye contact with a chic young mum improved my credit rating.”
Sarkar reserves some of her snarkiest comments for left-liberals seduced by identity politics. Instead of uniting minorities and the proletariat into an ecumenical alliance of the oppressed, she says, the present-day left has pitted them against one another in an Olympics of victimhood. She goes to a crankish conference in Liverpool where a speaker declares, to nods of approval, that “we should dismantle all our movements that aren’t majority people of colour”. This in a country that is over 80% white. Sarkar is right: this stuff is just “bananas”.
People in these circles are, of course, quite justified in being exercised by racial oppression. But they are often less interested in remedying it collectively than claiming it individually. Some rather absurd propositions have flowed from this habit of mind. We meet the online commentators who argue that Anne Frank had “white privilege”. Then we have the “decolonising” yoga teacher who declares that “white-led yoga spaces” are “traumatising for people of colour”. Or take this tetchy response by a Jewish comedian to a tweet by an Arab-Australian Muslim poet claiming that Jesus resembled his family: “He’s not just claiming Jesus as a brown person: he’s claiming him. Which, however you look at it – and however correct it is that Jesus was Middle Eastern – tramples on his Jewishness.”
Mired in fratricidal identitarianism, left-liberals have lost the argument to the hard right, which has repurposed class politics with a racial tinge. So it is that yesterday’s “chavs” have been re-baptised as the “white working class”. Google’s Ngram viewer shows the inversion in their lexical fortunes since 2000. In the early years of this century, Sarkar observes, it was perfectly acceptable to portray the working classes as disgusting chavs, egregiously reckless with money and “suspiciously interested in black culture”. To the journalist James Delingpole, writing in the Times, they were “dismal ineducables”, and “pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye”.
That was in 2006. Fast-forward to 2017, and Delingpole had recast himself as a tribune of the left-behind, railing against the “liberal elite … which thinks it’s perfectly acceptable, desirable even, to pour scorn and bile on the white working class”. Where chavs were once lazy and stupid, the white working class is decent, hardworking and yes, bigoted, though its bigotry turns on “legitimate concerns”. Courted hard by the Tories, the white working class was hoisted by its own petard. Its support proved crucial in electing a succession of governments that first imposed a hostile environment towards migrants and then extended the same treatment to poor British people; some 120,000 excess deaths were directly attributable to austerity.
Sarkar’s counsel, that the left ought to quit whingeing and get its act together, is welcome. Yet I’m sceptical about her implicit assumption – that an alliance between minorities and the left is the natural state of things. I’m a Marxist like Sarkar, but I think it is at least worth recognising that British Indians, Pakistanis and Nigerians can be reactionary conservatives; a great many are. To pretend that they never hold to casteism, misogyny or homophobia is foolish.
Sarkar says that Britain’s “thin-skinned, thick-witted” political class has an unhealthy obsession with the media. The same charge can be levelled at her. This is the work of someone who has evidently spent far too much time on X; indeed, she cultivates the image of a sassy social commentator, a sort of Tariq Ali of looking at your phone a lot. Truth be told, it’s not so much the leader writers of the Tory press who are in charge of the country as more impersonal, structural forces. Clinton’s political adviser James Carville – no Marxist – recognised this in the late 90s: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope. But now I would like to come back as the bond market.”
• Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
