Minority Rule, Race and Class

JS Titus describes the construction of race in Britain today, starting from Ash Sarkar’s recent book and talk about the ‘white working class’

Ash Sarkar is an activist and journalist who emerged from the British student movement and co-founded Novara Media, which rose to prominence during the Corbyn era – boosted further by a viral moment where she famously declared, “I’m literally a communist, you idiot,” during a heated exchange with Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan. Her debut book, Minority Rule, written with a mainstream audience in mind, draws on her personal experiences in activism to explore how identity politics has shifted from a radical tool for organising to something diluted and, at times, obstructive within left-wing movements. 

Sarkar’s overarching argument is that the right wing has successfully redirected class conflict into a culture war. By weaponising identity politics and manufacturing a notion of ‘minority rule’, that is, ‘the paranoid fear that identity minorities and progressives are conniving to oppress majority populations’, conservative forces, such as the media and political establishment have been able to build a new hegemony against working class interests. By tracing the ideological construction of moral panics in the media and analysing the behaviour of lobby journalists, and establishment figures, Sarkar shows how the boundaries between the interests of media and politics align to manufacture consent and spin discourse. Signifiers such as identity, ‘woke’, ‘DEI’ (diversity, equality and inclusion), or the ‘transgender issue’, are mobilised to create a sense of disorder, difference and disruption in the cultural and political sphere, in the service of constructing political majorities for elite projects.

This is a good book. It is a useful introduction to the machinations of politicians and pundits and it effectively describes the symptoms of the establishment’s politicisation of identity. However, it does not go far enough in grappling with its root causes and does not sufficiently explore identity in relation to the current conjuncture, almost foreclosing significant factors that have led to where we are now. In this review, I want to focus on two gaps that limit Sarkar’s analysis. First, the account of the development of a white working-class subject is too limited historically and in terms of political economy. Second, there is no account of the shifting class character of racialised people, and relatedly, why radical identity politics was subsumed by liberalism. The absence of these accounts can make it seem as though all it took to hoodwink the public was the conniving of politicians and the media. Finally, I will touch on how a clearer sense of class politics is necessary in strategising a universalist politics of liberation.

Constructing the “white working class”

One of the key things that Sarkar astutely points to is the transformation of the ‘chav’ into the ‘white working class’ as a distinct form of elite social and cultural codification. In an excellent section on the 2011 riots, Sarkar identifies how the category of the ‘white working class’ displaces ‘chavs’. She draws on Owen Jones’ Chavs to illustrate how the right-wing and media’s portrayal of working-class people shifted from ridicule to romanticisation, serving to alienate the left from those it typically seeks to represent and defend while rebranding the right as its defender. Sarkar uses a Google Ngram, which analyses the use of terms in books to show that in the wake of the 2011 riots, the use of chav declined just as the white working-class surged.

However, this process doesn’t fit quite as neatly as the Google Ngram would seem to demonstrate. The formation of a ‘white working class’ identity must be understood through the lens of earlier moments. For one thing, the ability to develop such a notion was predicated on the existing racialisation of class in Britain. As Satnam Virdee has argued, the ‘golden age’ of the welfare state that the British social democracy yearns after was also the ‘golden age of white supremacy, of legal racist discrimination’ in which ‘the working class were active participants in the project of reconstructing a national identity built on the twin principles of a common citizenship and the welfare compromise’. While racism was nothing new back then, through the nationalistic tendencies of social democracy, ‘the state, the employer and worker came to adhere to a common belief in British nationalism underpinned by a shared allegiance to whiteness.’

The discourse against chavs, was a culmination of New Labour’s attacks on those amongst the working class deemed as surplus to capital’s requirements. The distinction between the ‘working’ and the ‘not working’ was also material in the demonisation and dehumanisation of ‘asylum seekers’, who were classed as scroungers and ‘bogus asylum seekers’. To bring things into the 21st century, the 2001 riots sparked by confrontations between Asian youths and far-right provocateurs in former mill towns such as Burnley, Oldham, and Bradford were central to the development of a new racialised conception of class. As Sita Balani notes: 

Mediatised images of street clashes between South Asian and white men ensured that these events were seen through the prism of race rather than poverty, poor housing, or unemployment. Though the official report [into the riots] noted these conditions of marginalisation, it quickly sidelined material realities in favour of grave warnings that young British Pakistanis were living ‘parallel lives’ to their white counterparts.

Hot on the heels of the riots was the so-called ‘war on terror’, which operationalised British Muslims as homegrown enemies of the state. These moments catalysed a racialised conception of the working class. By 2006, Tony Blair was aligning with the right-wing critique of multiculturalism: ‘We like our diversity,’ he said. ‘But how do we react when that “difference” leads to separation and alienation from the values that define what we hold in common?’ The conditions of diversity and equality become constrained, and instead ‘difference’ is established in relation to a nationalist lens of values that ‘we’ hold, but other, outsiders do not.

In 2007, Blair’s successor Gordon Brown pledged ‘British jobs for British workers’, and in the wake of the economic crash in 2008, the slogan was repeated by many wildcat strikers in the construction industry protesting against the use of foreign workers. Even before the crash, the white working class was being recast as a uniquely downtrodden, neglected group, from whom something had been taken away. This narrative gained traction in mainstream media, notably during the BBC’s 2008 “White season”, whose commissioning editor remarked: “I feel that the white working class has been ignored by the political classes because they feel the pressure of political correctness.” 

This identity-work of developing a notion of a white working class dovetails with the moral panic that erupts in the wake of the 2011 riots. Islamophobia and racism against British South Asians melds with the revulsion against Black urban rebellion to legitimise the identity of a white working class, fearful of encroachments upon private property. The white working class is constructed as those who do not occupy the cosmopolitan urban centres where the riots broke out, but the exurban, traditionalist areas, or the ‘red Wall’. The white working class becomes a floating signifier – as Sarkar argues, ‘no one’s talking about the class bit of white working class’. However, this racialised notion of the working class itself becomes an identity that white people of any background can articulate with: Got a regional accent? Then you too can be a part of the aggrieved, white working class!

Resentment against minorities became a contagious weapon of feeling. Deindustrialisation and austerity created an economic and cultural scarcity in towns and cities across Britain, in which an opening, or a wound, has surfaced, which is mobilised by the political establishment and the ruling class. This wound is nourished by the discourse against migration and has been an ever-present factor in British politics through Brexit, to Johnsonism and to the current Starmer regime. As Richard Seymour writes ‘Disaster nationalists speak the language of class. They claim to represent an “abandoned”, “betrayed”, “left-behind” constituency, abbreviated in the anglosphere as the “white working class”.’ 

This injury against the so-called ‘white working class’ is operationalised by the far right, transforming the left-behind working class into a totemic identity, claimed and carried as a badge of nationalist victimhood. The right and the establishment do not fix the problems, but rather offer empowerment through that emotional wound, allowing the far right to posture as the voice of those scorned by the liberal establishment and Labour. 

In States of Injury, Wendy Brown argues that the state not only creates identities but binds individuals to these identities through the injuries they suffer, turning wounds into sites of political attachment. The next step for those who feel left behind has in some cases been to ‘reinvent’ what WEB Du Bois frames as a ‘psychological wage’. According to Du Bois, while low wage white workers in the American South were exploited in the late 19th century, their whiteness was constructed through the practice of the ‘psychological wage’, whereby they could enjoy a social standing above that of Black workers. For Du Bois, this process stood in the way of class solidarity, and as Jonas Marvin argues, the 2024 racist riots represented a ‘struggle to reinvent the psychological wage’, or a yearning for that fantasy of the ‘national social democratic moment when the white worker was a beneficiary of the racialised, imperial division of labour.’

The development of a reactionary, ‘white working-class’ identity, then, has longer and deeper roots than Sarkar’s book suggests. This is significant because it would be severely disempowering to imagine that this shift was based merely on a switch in the discourse following 2011. Rather, 2011 marked an inflection point in which these multiple processes were able to cohere into what would become a potent and toxic combination.

Minority rulers

Sarkar links transphobia, the ‘Great Replacement Theory’, and attacks on abortion rights to a broader demographic panic. These issues, she argues, are not separate but part of a coordinated effort to police and control who constitutes the nation. By framing progressive struggles as an existential threat, the right fuels reactionary politics and justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Sarkar identifies shifts in how companies and politicians use identity in a way that is diluted from its original intentions, exploring the distortions between black radical feminist collective, the Combahee River Collective’s invention of identity politics and today’s discourse, particularly Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which became a big hit after the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020. However, she doesn’t really diagnose why or how liberal movements take up and distort these radical ideas. How does the rallying cry of ‘believe black women’ end up with a Kamala Harris presidential run? 

Capitalism’s contradictions seek resolutions in novel ways. Our current moment is defined by crises: economic stagnation, political volatility, and war. So, race again becomes a medium through which capitalism can create a fantasy of order.  After the crises of the 1970s, the black radicalism of the period found itself filtered through the state as ‘Racial Awareness Training’. Labour councils were enthusiastic in embracing the ‘race relations’ industry that sought to tie the grievances of the racialised working class to the state. As Sivanadan put it, it was an opportunity for racialised mediators ‘to blossom into the new “black” leadership, and later the “state-class”, that would manage racism and keep the lid on protest – or at least deflect it from political struggle.’ It also broke racialised groups into atomised ‘ethnicities’. Gail Lewis argues that under ‘these conditions, which included state-organised competition for funding and “recognition”, the sign “Black” came under pressure as a way to articulate the struggles of various minoritised communities and struggles against racism’.

Meanwhile, there was a major expansion of the racialised middle class from the 1970s onwards. Today, the fruits of this shifting class composition is seen not just in the Labour party but in the leadership of the Tory party, in figures like Kemi Badenoch and Rishi Sunak. This does not negate racism, but it is an indication of a shift in how it operates. It underlines the fact that any notion of a coherent South Asian or Black community is a misnomer. In Britain, diasporic culture is often maintained alongside Britishness and can witness a ‘code-switching’ between identities. These figures also demonstrate an expansion of resentment towards ‘new’ migrants and they are key to establishing a narrative of meritocracy while continuing racialised exclusions. South Asian Tory minister Suella Braverman encapsulated it when saying that seeing a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda is her ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’. Likewise, on the ideological landscape of the far right, Reform UK – which attempts to appeal beyond its white reactionary base with Zia Yusuf and Ben Habib – show how race and migration politics are used in ways that draw in sections of racialised communities. The creation of racialised insiders is always bound up with rearticulation of racialised outsiders.

Capitalist relations can capture radical left identities and reshape them into palatable liberal forms that ultimately serve elite interests. These diluted versions are easier for the right to galvanise against, framing the left as both out-of-touch and hostile to ‘ordinary people.’ This cycle of capture and reaction deepens the rift between class solidarity and cultural identity. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò puts it, ‘Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.’ The rise of a racialised middle class, even the incorporation of racialised elites into the ruling class, has seen many radical notions and impulses repackaged in order to defend elite interests, even embedding them in the state. Alex Stoffel has explained this in relation to queer politics, showing how capital not only constructs but subsequently tears down racialised identities, gender relations and family forms in its drive to accumulate. ‘All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify’, as Marx and Engels put it. Stoffel suggests that while identities can be antagonistic to capital in certain conjunctures, this is not the case across time, and the capitalist state is capable of subsuming progressive impulses while generating new deprivations. 

The rise of Trumpism fits seamlessly into this pattern. His administration’s aggressive stance against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is not solely about ‘identity politics’ – it is an anti-worker position too. Mass layoffs, targeting both DEI roles and broader working-class jobs, expose this strategy’s core function: to dismantle solidaristic gains under the guise of rejecting ‘woke’ excess. Yet Trump achieves this by playing up to a resentment of DEI that can be seen as hostility to empty bureaucratism or to the advancement of racialised professional classes. Radicalism shorn of its tougher edges becomes something that tarnishes actual transformative politics by association. This raises urgent questions for the left: how will it defend workers who are discarded in this backlash, when the very language of equity has been co-opted as a right-wing scapegoat?

(Post)Corbynism and class politics

Despite her critique, Sarkar does not reject identity-based struggle and is clear about the need to fight ‘the brutal injustices of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia’. She calls for a return to class politics that does not minoritise itself. The left’s obsession with internal purity tests and cultural policing, she argues, has made it easier for the right to weaponise divisions, and the solution lies in refocusing on material conditions and broad-based solidarity. However, many of her criticisms seem to be aimed at an online bogeyman rather than the kind of activists who inhabit organising spaces today. Moreover, her arguments have been somewhat undermined by her media tour promoting the book, focused on reproducing and mocking caricatures of left-wing activists – like the idea that leftists get outraged over salad spinners as they represent white supremacy. As Shanice McBean has suggested, ‘it felt like a resurrection of the old red-scare decrying “loony lefties”.’

So, what would a universal class politics look like? Sarkar suggests that class can be an awareness of common interests, or a question of the distribution of wealth, before settling on a position informed by Dan Evans in which Britain is dominated by a sprawling petty bourgeoisie. However, this view of class suffers from a formalism which sees the car the Uber driver owns, or the laptop given to the white collar worker by their boss, not as an extension of their labour power in a vertical power relationship between employer and employed, but as the signs of a competitive, middling ownership class with an individualist ethos and agency atypical of the proletariat. 

In the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016, Sarkar’s vox pop’s were arguably some of her strongest work, capturing a range of voices and offering an exploration of differing views on immigration. She writes in the book that after the 2019 election: 

I felt a horrible sense of personal responsibility. I wrote articles arguing that Labour should take more of a pro-EU stance than a pro-Brexit one. I lobbied hard on things like more ambitious climate commitments, ending immigration detention and adopting universal basic income. I forgot the number one rule in politics: learn how to count. Because there were far more people in the country who weren’t like me than those who were.

Of course it was a grave error for Corbyn to pursue a disastrous and anti-democratic ‘second referendum’. But it would be a shame if our takeaway from 2019 was that we should not argue hard against immigration detention because the numbers don’t stack up. One lesson of 2019 that we still need to grapple with is how we express a politics of freedom and liberation that can transform subjectivities that align with a sense of wounded identity, or attachment to some fantasy of the past. We won’t do that by conceding to such politics, but by forging a new, more hopeful one. The task which Sarkar’s book best illustrates is that the left must learn how to construct majorities which bind together people’s passions, intuitions and everyday desires. We need to conjure up a counter-politics which articulates together the working class of the red wall and the inner city, organising with people and seeking to change hearts, minds and everything else. 

Minority Rule is published by Bloomsbury.