REVIEW: 'Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War' by Ash Sarkar

'A magazine goes to a bookstore...'

You can walk into any Waterstones now and be greeted by a plethora of meta-ironic titles such as How the Rich Absolutely Fucking Shaft the Poor and The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fucking Fuck, as well as various post-colonial diatribes by authors whose surnames have letters that do not belong together. But somehow, my own Waterstones experience was even worse than this, with at least four stands dedicated to noted con-artist Gary Stevenson’s book The Trading Game, which — coincidentally — is also about how the rich shaft the poor.

Another contributor was meant to review Ash Sarkar’s new book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, but sadly he had a stroke when he saw Angeball, a biography of the current Tottenham Hotspur manager, situated right next to her essay collection. (This marked two books in a row that this individual has failed to review, the other being Marie le Conte’s Escape: How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed and Survived the Internet, which was so boring that the entire review was scrapped.) As it happens, Angeball is — yet again — about the rich shafting the poor, in that the fans pay for season tickets, and the footballers on eight-figure salaries don’t win any trophies.

Since I am the only thick-skinned Arsenal fan in the entire country who isn’t Woke, I have done my duty and written an extended review of Minority Rule. You now don’t have to read what is in fact a 700,000 character @AyoCaesar tweet about how hedge fund managers are the real reason that Mumsnet hates men dressed as women — and it’s all thanks to yours truly.

Being a food writer like me is easy. It relies entirely on your senses. You don’t actually have to use your brain to arrive at a conclusion. You side-eye a waiter and maybe scoff at the bimbos having red wine with their sashimi (knowing that tannins and fish can leave a distinct coppery taste in your mouth for the rest of the night). By contrast, with book reviews, you actually have to read and digest information. I bought some sticky tabs to bookmark every passage I disagreed with, and even had them colour-coded: blue for economic ripostes; green for disputing the politics of climate change; pink for catty remarks about Sarkar herself; and so on. But by the time I finished the introduction, I had already used more than thirty tabs, and realised I would need to buy more from Amazon. Given that for my (unpaid and unexpensed) review I’d already spent £18.99 on a 260-page opinion piece, I decided that Sarkar had exploited me enough, and gave up.

Stylistically, it is exactly what you’d expect: millennial condescension that’s not so confident in itself. At university, bored during lockdown, my friends and I decided to try out waterboarding to see what all the fuss was about. Her jerky, lurching prose gave me the exact same feeling of dread as getting hosed down with a towel on your face; the main difference here was that I caved in to the would-be interrogators in seven seconds. I’d choose the towel and the bucket over this book every single time.

Sarkar says that this has been a project spanning three years: from 2021 to 2024. You can tell, and this is not for the better. There are shades of the tyrannical race politics of 2020/21; and yet, in her rejection of so-called ‘identity politics’ as actually being a consequence of blue jeans and Coca-Cola, there are somehow also shades of 2023/24. It is partly this lack of intellectual coherence that makes reviewing the book so difficult. It is also why reading it is, fundamentally, a complete waste of time, even for those who are merely curious about contemporary left-wing ‘thought’.

Chapter 1. Hors d'oeuvre: ‘How the “I” Took Over Identity Politics’

After some ramblings about Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam calling other leftists ‘cunts’, Sarkar tells us that — presumably thinking this rather ironic — it is the Left who have absorbed the ‘tenets of liberal identity politics’. She informs us that ‘…we have nurtured a culture that’s deeply individualistic’. It’s all very unfortunate.

We can’t let Sarkar get away with this kind of revisionism. ‘Identity politics’ wasn’t imposed on her by market forces. No: Sarkar is the very face of it. She has made a career out of race-baiting, telling us that we need to check our white privilege, that whiteness (i.e., British culture) needs to be eradicated, et cetera. It’s fundamental to everything she believes in. Sarkar laments the fact that the Left has become obsessed with policing language, and its tendency to purity spiral into oblivion. Well, they do say that the revolution devours its own children; however, in this case, it’s more like taking the pin out of a hand grenade and just dropping it on the floor, obliterating everyone.

Sarkar tells us that the working classes must study the coalition between the Black Panthers of the United States and the ‘Yellow Panthers’ of North Vietnam in their collective struggle for liberation from American capitalism. Taking inspiration, I went to collect some facts on the ground to see if the working classes cared at all about KGB-backed psyops from fifty years ago, and took the train up to Manchester. Now, the train-tram-and-twink brigade on X told me that a ticket would cost me millions of pounds, but I got a single for £41 with a railcard. Not cheap, but considering that — converting to homosexual currency — this is about five-and-a-half pints of Neck Oil in London, I didn’t think it was quite as bad as some people like to claim.

I sought out the most downtrodden-looking people I could find, and asked them about the Yellow Panthers. To my surprise, quite a few had heard of them — though, for some reason, those who had heard of them were all male. When I prodded them further for an opinion on their work, they said they gave a good massage. ‘So there are Yellow Panthers living in Manchester? They must be old?’, I asked. The only response: ‘Well, there’s only one, and it’s a woman in her forties, she’s great fun if you want to meet her.’ Strange. She’d have to be born well after the war in Vietnam to only be in her forties. I suppose that there must be Asian-Americans who have dedicated their lives to keeping up the good fight in the Yankee homeland, long after the last flight out of Saigon. ‘She’s Chinese and doesn’t speak a word of English’, they all told me. Well, they do say that the revolution will transcend all borders!

So, much to Sarkar’s delight, it turns out that the disenfranchised working class of the North had indeed heard of the ‘Yellow Panthers’. I stand corrected.

What remains of the chapter is just a series of boring anecdotes about rather niche culture war debates. In one of the many instances in this book where she invents enemies to attack, she blames the ‘Christian Right’ in this country for the backlash against transgenderism. I had a brief look at the Christian Right in this country, and it turns out that they (all ten of them) want to import five million Filipinos to ‘Make Britain Catholic Again’, much to the delight of people who can’t afford train tickets and Fraser Nelson.

Chapter 2. Soup: ‘Talk Is cheap’

This has to be the most boring chapter ever written in any book. I was fooled into think that maybe, just maybe, Sarkar had chosen to be introspective about the various punitive debates she had embroiled herself in. She cringes at herself when looking back at a debate about whether Apu from The Simpsons is a racist caricature. She, ever the millennial, cites her love for the show while trying to remember her motives for embroiling herself in this dispute. The answer is ‘publicity’, of course, and that’s fine. You don’t need to feel remorseful about this, because vacuous debates about things no-one really cares about is basically your schtick.

Her next target is known right-wing radical Piers Morgan. Sarkar is upset that Morgan has been a bit shouty about transgenderism. The chapter then takes a bizarre turn when she decides to dress up as Sunder Katwala (I will leave readers to imagine what this looks like); immediately, not wanting to break character, she’s citing this and that polling. She suggests that the British public actually have quite moderate views on transgenderism, and that the results of the polling are entirely dependent on how the question is posed.

She’s right, but for the wrong reasons. Any support the wider British public might have for transgenderism is entirely bovine: people assuming that men in dresses is actually backed by very serious research because, after all, those academic bigwigs are saying as much. It’s an appeal to authority; no different from how people trusted Chris Whitty and Imperial College London when they suggested locking down the entire country over a bad case of the flu. Here, answering in the affirmative to a question like ‘should men live as women if they want?’ is sold as consent for your daughter getting battered playing rugby against a hulking biological male.

Bizarrely, given the importance she clearly assigns to the issue, Sarkar then tries to relegate transgenderism to a ‘petty culture war issue’ utilised by the Tories to cover up their atrocious record in government. This is true to an extent, but it doesn’t invalidate the topic. Quite apart from anything else, Sarkar can’t be allowed to turn around and call transgenderism a mere ‘petty culture war issue’ when the debacle was an assault on reality itself, and one that Sarkar was, and still is, fully signed up for. Culture wars should be fought, and it simply isn’t true that they necessarily come at the expense of debates over more important issues.

As an aside, Will Lloyd of The Times also attempted to decipher what the phrase ‘partial but dramatic democratisation of the public sphere’ meant, but to no avail. After a month of thorough research, I couldn’t manage either. Sarkar accuses X/Twitter of ‘melting our brains’, which is just an attempt to cope with the fact that the left-wing media has crumbled over the past decade. In fact, the whole book is full of these slightly schizophrenic soliloquys about how our attention has been monetised and our eyeballs converted into revenue. Well, I raise my glass to that. I’m sure that there are analysts at BNP Paribas who could securitise this and make it into a structured product.

This entire chapter should have been 86’d in the kitchen. It’s highly questionable whether it was even worth finishing, let alone writing a review. Stale.

Chapter 3. Poisson: ‘The Lobby’

If Communists are good for anything, they’d surely be good for drawing parallels between the past and the present. I was awaiting some kind of reference to historical materialism, or at least a word-salad that was Marxist in intent. ‘You tried’, I would have said.

So, when discussing ‘meritocracy’ — which, not unreasonably, she contrasts with Britain’s current political system — did she cite Napoleonic France? Imperial China? The East India Company? Of course not. Sarkar writes:

People are the products of systems. As a friend of mine likes to say, if aliens came down tomorrow and tried to work out what was really important to the citizens of Earth, they’d be forced to conclude that our species is dedicated to identifying individuals who are really good at football. Most young males, at some point in their lives, will come into contact with a teacher or coach who will assess them for speed, agility, ball retention and reflexes. If you’ve got the skills and the desire, you’ll ascend upwards through a pyramid which culminates with the Jules Rimet, the Ballon d’Or and the Carabao Cup (all right, some of these are more prestigious than others). It’s as close to a meritocracy as we’ve been able to create: even nepo babies like Erling Haaland are undeniably good at what they do. And when you, the punter, see Lionel Messi carving up a defence, or Kylian Mbappé going sicko mode, you can reasonably infer that this guy is probably the best guy in the world who could do his job.

Sarkar, I would like to remind readers, studied English Literature at University College London, which should be a massive indictment of the entire field, and perhaps even higher education more generally.

The last line of this babble, possibly generated by ChatGPT, put me off reading Minority Rule for about a week. I could not continue until I had undergone extensive electroconvulsive therapy. In fact, the entire book is full of uncanny references to football, and (speaking from personal experience) getting through one of them does not make it easier to get through the next. Whether it’s rather forced quips about ‘Mediterranean nations with a superior midfield’, or her undying love for Tottenham Hotspur, it gives the impression of someone with a deep identity crisis, no matter how many times she shouts WHEEEEYYYY in a pub when the newly-employed Polish PhD drops and smashes a pint glass.

In yet more boilerplate analysis, Sarkar also condemns the entanglement of politicians with the press. A televised parliament and press briefings have turned the latter into a constituency that needs to be specifically catered to. It is quite reasonable to complain about MPs using the Commons to grandstand about local issues, wasting everyone’s time. Obviously, it is absurd that the Rt Hon. Member for Whocares can use a question to the Prime Minister to talk about a local florist closing down.

Except, predictably, this isn’t really what Sarkar is complaining about. Instead, she cites Suella Braverman — one of the few Tory MPs with genuine convictions on the issue of mass migration — as concocting the Rwanda Plan just for a few Daily Telegraph headlines. This, yet again, is obviously in bad faith. No: complaints about mass migration are not just a psyop by Tory MPs in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch. (This, by the way, is the crux of the entire book’s ‘argument’. The ‘that foreigner wants your cookie’ meme. So if you have started reading, feel free to stop at page 110.) The polling you happily cited just one chapter ago tells us that it is consistently one of the most salient issues in all of British politics.

In another attempt at some half-hearted introspection, Sarkar attacks Keir Starmer for merely resorting to meaningless gestures during the Summer of Floyd. Taking the knee wasn’t enough for Sarkar: she condemns Sir Keir for dismissing the ‘defund the police’ movement. In the very same chapter in which she complains of Tory MPs for jostling for approval from the right-leaning press in Britain, she implores that Starmer ignore the British press entirely and listen to the American press instead, heeding the calls of literal foreigners for us to stop policing black people.

What remains of the chapter is just Sarkar seething about journalists and politicians rubbing shoulders; boring rigmarole that I, as a food writer, don’t care about. Maybe she ought to reinvent herself, like that Greek lady I keep seeing on GB News, and play both sides? Verdict: confused, and extremely bitter.

Chapter 4. Palate Cleanser: ‘Economics Are the method’

As I forced myself to push through and finish this horrible meal, I was reminded of Louis Wain’s descent into madness. While his later works were a reflection of his schizophrenia, it cannot be denied that they were still compelling.

But sadly, in Sarkar’s case, not only is Minority Rule not at all compelling: it is the kind of delusion that ought to get you sectioned. At one point, she reminisces celebrating the 2017 General Election. She was, we are informed, ‘…lager arsed through the air like England had just scored an equaliser in the ninetieth minute, and by morning, our voices were hoarse from cheering’. This is strange, as I do not remember a Prime Minister Corbyn. I crunched the numbers, and worked out that in order to win an election, you need to win 326 seats. 262 is still some way short.

In this chapter, Sarkar dedicates a few pages to explaining what ‘class’ actually means in modern Britain. Her conclusion? ‘Class’ relates to one’s material condition; it is media-induced ‘moral panics’ over mass migration that have split the working class along identitarian lines. Predictably, while Sarkar has a lot to say about ‘white working class’ Londoners moving rightwards in response to their own displacement, she has nothing to say about people voting to protest the displacement of foreigners living literally thousands of miles away. It’s completely ridiculous that Sarkar still somehow feels able to call concern over mass migration a ‘moral panic’ while also not lambasting people wasting their vote over the conflict in Gaza — which, by the same logic, is itself a ‘moral panic’, at least for your average voter.

For all of her complaints about the ‘white working class’ failing to understand their real material interests, it’s actually Sarkar and her Novara Media colleagues who are incapable of separating their theoretical commitment to so-called ‘Marxism’ from the actually-existing conditions that her class of ‘young renters’ suffer from. Just look at her handler, Novara Media’s Aaron Peters (a.k.a. Aaron Bastani), who has recently started to discover his inner YIMBY, preaching for housebuilding and energy abundance. Sometimes, he even suggests a tiny bit of border control. So who did he vote for? The Green Party. It’s impossible to wash off being a stupid communist.

Did Sarkar take some time to reevaluate her ideas after sitting down with Dominic Cummings to quiz him on ‘strategies’? Of course not. All she could do was watch in confusion as the Dark Data baldie explained that you can bridge the gap between Tory and Labour voters by campaigning on immigration restrictionism and adjacent issues (e.g., Brexit). There’s no reason to engage with Sarkar’s analysis of Cummings, whom she likens — in yet another football reference — to Sir Alex Ferguson (personally, I had him down as a Pep Guardiola type, but then again, neither of us actually watch football). Despite going to all the trouble of an interview, Sarkar suggests that the Brexit Referendum was won on ‘dodgy data practices and a £350 million lie plastered on the side of a bus’. When you buy this book, you think that you’re getting the latest, cutting-edge analysis from a youthful Communist rebel; in fact, you’re getting the burblings of an establishment ghoul à la Emily Maitlis, but without any of the amusing dipsomania.

It is often claimed that at cheap holiday destinations, they will serve you imitation calamari, which is made out of pig’s rectum. This, apparently, will deceive most tourists. Well, this chapter’s title certainly deceived me into thinking that there might be some juicy economic argument within. But upon closer inspection, I knew what I was dealing with: it really was all just arse.

Chapter 5. Main Course: ‘One Big Gang’

My sole memory of the riots in 2011 was a black guy stealing a massive sack of basmati rice from a Turkish corner shop. You’d think from the way Sarkar talks about the police shooting of career criminal Mark Duggan that blacks are murdered by cops in their thousands weekly. So, according to Sarkar, why were there riots in 2011? Budget cuts, of course! At long last, we get some Marxist theory: cuts to the Department for Transport had compelled hundreds of hooligans to go out and loot televisions! Wow! ‘Getting our taxes back’, said the Disengaged Battlers as they prepared to battle with Indian shopkeepers over shisha pens.

Sarkar, correctly, picks up on the decline of chav-bashing since the Financial Crisis; however, inevitably, she comes to the wrong conclusion, yet again. She argues that the Right have successfully hijacked class politics since 2016 by appealing to the disenfranchised ‘white working class’ and fanning the flames of race politics. (I’d argue that this is somewhat hypocritical — to say the least — for someone who celebrates the flight of the native white British population from their own capital, but I digress.) Sarkar fails to realise that chav-bashing reached its zenith during the Blair years because it was, at least in part, a propaganda operation to justify mass migration and multiculturalism. Let it be remembered that today, chav-bashing is almost solely the preserve of ethnic minorities who use it to justify their own existence here, with racist tropes like ‘gammon’ and delusional narratives about ‘doing the jobs natives won’t do’.

Sarkar does at least seem to have figured out that, increasingly, ‘white working class’ is just a euphemism for ‘white’. She thinks this is a revelation, but in reality we moved on from this several years ago. It’s another case of Sarkar debating old, tired narratives; in this case, it’s GB News in 2022. I’d like to remind Sarkar that it’s now 2025. Class doesn’t really matter so much when your government is flooding hotels next to primary schools with thousands of mysterious Kurds and Afghans.

She calls David Starkey ‘nuttier than a slice of baklava’ — we get it, you’re from Haringey — but the only way to describe this chapter is that it was ‘out of date’. Inedible.

Chapter 6. Optional Cheese Course: ‘Demographic Panic’

After bitching about TERFs and failing to define a woman, we finally reach the point where she tries to define ‘race’. This is exciting: Sarkar had finally left her comfort zone (moaning about the press). This was undoubtedly daring, but sadly, she did not pull it off. I actually felt second-hand embarrassment when she attempted to label her celebration of demographic change a ‘joke’, arguing that ‘sarcasm’ is something the British could surely get behind, in another rather uncanny appeal to what she perceives to be ‘British values’. Presumably, this is on a laminated sheet in a classroom somewhere.

So how, then, does Sarkar justify demographic change? She says that it’s a fact of human existence. So I flew to Israel, drove to the Occupied Territories, and scolded some Palestinian children, waving Sarkar’s Little Red Book (it’s red under the cover). I inform them that, and I quote, ‘…the only thing in the entirety of human history is that we must continually adapt to change’. Guess they should have thought of that before they resisted.

I didn’t think that this could get any more embarrassing, but once again, Sarkar delivered. She attempted to prove that biological race is an invalid concept:

In reality, research into genetics has found that there is significant variation within regional groups, and small differences between them. According to a 2002 study conducted by Stanford, more than 92 per cent of 4,000 alleles were found in two or more regions. More than half of them could be found in all seven regions that they examined. And region — specific alleles only showed up in 1 per cent of people from that area — hardly enough to base an entire system for categorising the human species. In short, if race was a matter of mutually exclusive genetics, a Bengali-heritage woman like me probably wouldn’t have the same hair colour as someone from Japan, the same eye colour as a person from Italy, or be able to share foundation with my mate whose background is Somali.

‘Race isn’t real because I have black hair and so do the Japanese.’ Well, so does a gorilla. Take some time to reflect upon that.

Chapter 7. Dessert: ‘The Price of Air’ [‘Planet Landlord’]

I have very little patience for Ian Hislop, and perhaps even less for people who find him funny. ‘The Tories would privatise the air if they could!’ is a joke that belongs on an episode of Have I Got News For You? from 2012, not in a book published in 2025 by a darling of the supposedly ‘youthful’ Left. I suppose it makes sense that Sarkar would find it funny, given that she is now geriatric.

Sarkar tries to demonstrate the supposed absurdity of a privatised water supply by comparing it to the hypothetical privatisation of oxygen. I think she fails to understand the task of supplying clean water to homes requires extensive man-made infrastructure, while oxygen naturally emanates into our homes from something we call ‘trees’. Now, you could argue that privatising the supply of water has allowed infrastructure to ‘crumble’ and for raw sewage to spill over into waterways — except you’d be wrong. She has neglected to mention planning, environmental, and cost regulation associated with building and upgrading infrastructure, which is in fact the main cause of this. The obvious implication here is that Ash wants to nationalise water. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that nationalised water actually works better than privatised. During public ownership, the Thames was a biologically dead river that resembled the Ganges, and more generally waterways in Britain resembled those in industrial towns in the Soviet Union more than the rivers we know today.

Inevitably, just in case anyone thought they’d finally escaped it, Sarkar soon moves back to her favourite topic: football. Just like any other football fan who is not a supporter of Manchester United, she is deeply upset about Manchester United being in the doldrums. Highly originally, she blames this on their owners, the Glazers. Now, if you know anything about football, you’ll know that Manchester United is one of the worst-run football clubs on the planet, and that this has nothing to do with a lack of money. If anything, it is the Glazers who have had their pockets rinsed by the incompetent Northern management of the club.

It is curious that it is somehow only Manchester United that has been shredded by ruthless foreign capitalists. The truth is that foreign investment (and Rupert Murdoch) pulled English football far ahead of its rivals. You can hardly condemn these ruthless foreign capitalists when it is primarily the sheer volume of money pouring into English football that has made the Premier League the biggest sporting franchise on the planet. It is because of oil money that teams in the Championship can have a bigger transfer budget than fourth-placed teams in Spain and Italy, and that the academies of Chelsea and Manchester City have helped put England back in the sharp end of international tournaments. After we give Chelsea back to Roman Abramovich, at taxpayer expense, we should build a statue honouring him — and I say this as an Arsenal fan who, much like Sarkar, does not actually watch football.

This is followed by a number of tedious, woolly, and entirely predictable arguments about ‘financialisation’ and ‘austerity’. I have my doubts as to whether Sarkar even knows what ‘financialisation’ means. ‘Bankers have been allowed to speculate on the price of food’? People have been speculating on the price of food since 4500 BC. Agricultural futures predate even the wheel. And as for ‘austerity’? All that ‘austerity’ meant was that — like the rest of us — NHS biscuit-huffers had to settle for no real increase in their salaries. This was quite the shock after a decade of having money thrown at them.

Equality feels like oppression for those accustomed to living in privilege. Very salty.

Verdict. Petit fours: Smelling the Coffee

If there’s anything at all to be learnt from this book, it is that there is absolutely no future for the Left in this country, and that there is zero chance of any hard-left revival. How can there be when the Left’s most vocal proponents celebrate Britain’s demographic demise and then laugh off such statements as jokes, making a saccharine appeal to Britain’s fucking sense of bloody sarcasm?

As soon as you filter out the petty anecdotes and media rigmarole nobody actually cares about, you’re left with little more than limp-wristed calls for renationalisation and a flood of cringeworthy football references. Curiously, there was not even any condemnation of GB News: I can only assume she must have gotten the call from her Iranian handler who, for some reason, is still being invited onto a channel that’s further right than any broadsheet.

At £18.99, you’re far better off subscribing to the Pimlico Journal newsletter for a couple of months than reading this junk. If enough of you do so, next time, I might actually be able to expense the train tickets.

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Image credits: Jeremy Corbyn, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

This article was written by Henry Reynolds Skelton, a regular Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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