In the mid-2010s, it briefly seemed as though Britain’s future might belong to people like Ash Sarkar. She had gone viral in the way only the left ever really does, by saying something quite ordinary (“I’m literally a communist”) and being punished for it with a million quote tweets. She was young, mixed-race, stylish, clever, and absolutely sure of herself. Unlike the ageing cadre of Corbynite thinkers and strategists who had clawed their way back from political extinction, Sarkar came of age in a different world: the world of social media, livestreams, clickbait, and the performance of ideology. She didn’t just appear on television, she became its stand-in, or what had replaced it. If Novara Media was the party line of a new left, Sarkar was its face, its tone, its delivery system.
“The paranoid fantasy of minority rule upholds a real minority rule.”
Ash Sarkar is arguably the most politically astute and media-literate figure on Britain’s radical left. Minority Rule is her first book, and if it’s anything to go by, it won’t be her last. Like her television appearances, it’s confident, articulate and sharply argued, a manifesto of clarity in a landscape clouded by spectacle.
When Corbynism collapsed, the media ecosystem that had briefly expanded to accommodate a new left rapidly shrank again. Figures like Aaron Bastani found themselves reduced to appearing on GB News or Talk TV, offering contrarian edge to reactionary formats. Sarkar, by contrast, remained the only recognisably radical voice with a regular presence on the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4. She was no longer television, but she hadn’t been disappeared by it either.
Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War is an attempt to take stock of what went wrong, not in the Labour Party, exactly, but in Britain: a country in which things are visibly, palpably broken, yet no political force seems able to name, let alone confront, the real source of power. Sarkar’s thesis is clear: the cultural backlash against a supposed ‘woke minority’ is not an organic uprising, but a manufactured hallucination. “The paranoid fantasy of minority rule,” she writes, “upholds a real minority rule.” It is not trans kids who are overrepresented in corporate boardrooms or government benches, but landlords, bankers, fossil fuel executives, and media barons.
The book is structured as a series of essays or dispatches from the frontline of Britain’s manufactured culture war, ranging from the confected panic around drag queens to the smearing of Black Lives Matter, from toppling statues to the myth of the silenced white working class. This episodic structure lends itself to sharp interventions but occasionally lacks connective tissue between chapters. Sarkar draws on her own experience, both as a media figure and as the target of sustained racist and misogynist abuse, to show how the reactionary right has seized the terrain of cultural grievance and made it appear oppositional. She is especially good at exposing how liberal institutions have accommodated this shift, absorbing the language of inclusion while quietly entrenching elite power.
Throughout, Sarkar refuses the false choice between identity politics and class struggle, showing how the former has been weaponised to derail the latter. Her argument is not that culture doesn’t matter, but that it only matters in the way it does because of who owns the megaphone. Behind every viral meltdown about pronouns or statues, she suggests, lies an oligarch looking to protect their assets.
“Instead of fighting to liberate ourselves from harm, we end up attached to the social status that being a victim brings.”
Where Sarkar offers a kind of cultural diagnosis—sharp, necessary, and often brilliant—Michael Chessum’s This Is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn attempts to chart a political way out. For Chessum, the failures of Corbynism were not merely the result of media hostility or party sabotage, but of a deeper failure to build a durable mass politics. His book is less punchy than Sarkar’s, less concerned with spectacle, but more interested in structure: how to organise, how to build, how to win. If Minority Rule tells us what we’re up against, This Is Only the Beginning asks what it would take to overcome it.
“The British left lost not just because it was outgunned—but because it was too nice.”
Together, the books map the impasse of Britain’s defeated left. Sarkar shows how the cultural terrain has been poisoned; Chessum starts sketching the route off it. Neither offers false comfort. But neither writes as if things must stay as they are.
Sarkar’s sharpest insight is that the cultural backlash is not simply reactionary, it is a form of ideological displacement. This inversion, where the powerful pose as the persecuted and the dispossessed are cast as tyrants, is, in Sarkar’s telling, the ideological masterstroke of our age. The book argues that the British right has successfully transformed the terrain of politics from economics to culture, from class to grievance, from exploitation to victimhood. “Capitalism,” she writes, “in commodifying every second of our waking lives, has managed to come up with a form of leisure that’s even more alienating than labour.” It is a striking line, and one that captures the disorientation of our moment: scrolling as alienation, debate as content, politics as feedback loop.
“Capitalism, in commodifying every second of our waking lives, has managed to come up with a form of leisure that’s even more alienating than labour.”
Sarkar is at her best when she charts the mechanics of this confusion. In a chapter on media, she dissects the transformation of journalism into a content industry, less about truth than traction. Her critique goes beyond Murdoch to implicate the entire structure of the attention economy, in which polarisation is profitable and algorithms reward outrage over insight. The result is not hegemony in the Gramscian sense, totalising and coherent, but a volatile mix of memes, moral panics, and manufactured culture wars.
That Sarkar can write this—and write it with flair—may surprise her detractors, who have long dismissed her as all style and no substance. A performative hard left? But Minority Rule makes clear that the style is part of the substance. Sarkar is a product of the post-2008 generation: debt-ridden, precarious, politically literate but structurally locked out. She is fluent in the idioms of Stuart Hall and Twitter (X), and it’s this fluency that allowed her, however briefly, to represent something larger than herself: a generational rupture. Minority Rule is her attempt to clarify the stakes of that rupture, to cut through the haze of vibes and refocus on class.
“Corbynism tried to accommodate the Labour right when it should have destroyed it.”
But if the book’s ideological critique is sharp, its strategic horizon is less clear. Sarkar diagnoses the illness with admirable lucidity. She is less sure about the cure.
For a fuller reckoning, we need to turn to Chessum’s memoir from the belly of the Corbyn machine, by someone who never quite bought the machine logic. Chessum, a former student organiser and Momentum strategist, offers a longer view. For him, Corbynism wasn’t an aberration, but the political crystallisation of a decade of revolt: student occupations, anti-austerity marches, migrant solidarity, grassroots unionism. The mistake was to believe that parliamentary power could substitute for social power, that you could deliver socialism from above without the infrastructure or political culture to sustain it from below.
“The paradox of the Corbyn moment,” Chessum writes, “is that it represents an enormous step forward for the British left but also precipitated a step backwards.” A generation radicalised by police kettles and budget cuts was repurposed into door-knocking and hashtag management. Momentum, originally conceived as a grassroots insurgency, became a delivery mechanism for central office. Party members were organised to campaign, not to think. There was a manifesto, but no movement. There were rallies, but no strategy. There were memes, but no discipline. And when Brexit cracked the coalition in half, the whole edifice fell in.
“Momentum became a delivery mechanism, not a movement. Rallies were not strategy. Memes were not power.”
This organisational failure, mistaking mass sentiment for mass organisation, is one that Sarkar doesn’t quite grapple with. She speaks eloquently about solidarity, affect, and the theft of working-class identity by the right. But she has less to say about how one builds durable institutions that can outlast the news cycle. To be fair, Minority Rule is a polemic, not a programme. But polemics, too, are political acts, and in a time of strategic crisis, clarity without direction can itself become a kind of retreat.
Part of the difficulty is that Sarkar was never quite of Corbynism. She was its media avatar, not its architect. Her presence on TV, debating Piers Morgan, outmanoeuvring hostile anchors (and politicians), offered a kind of symbolic revenge on a media class that had long excluded people like her. But it was also a trap. She became a lightning rod for the right, the designated face of ‘wokeness’, a proxy for everything the Mail and Telegraph loathed. And once Corbynism collapsed, the spotlight turned elsewhere. The British media no longer needs to platform leftists in order to ridicule them; it can simply ignore them.
This, too, is part of the story Minority Rule tries to tell: not just how the right won the culture war, but how the left lost the plot. Not through lack of ideas, Corbynism had them in spades, but through organisational and ideological incoherence. As Chessum writes, the Labour left never resolved the tension between its movementist origins and its electoral ambitions. It inherited the habits of New Labour even as it rejected its politics. “The lack of a truly empowered grassroots in the new Labour left,” he writes, “was not an accident but the result of a series of conscious decisions.”
“Sarkar was never quite of the machine—she was more useful to it than it was to her.”
Where does that leave us? Chessum ends his book with a call to rebuild from below: in workplaces, community groups, cultural spaces, anywhere that can generate the kinds of political consciousness that don’t evaporate with a lost election. Sarkar, more cautiously, insists on a politics of solidarity that refuses both liberal performance and right-wing bait. Sarkar’s sharpest passages are not those that diagnose the right, but those that probe the left’s own contradictions. She notes, for instance, how protest movements are increasingly shaped by the demands of visibility, by what will resonate in an algorithmic feed, rather than what will shift the balance of power. What emerges is a left often stuck between performance and paralysis, endlessly visible but increasingly incapable of strategic coordination. But neither offers a roadmap. Perhaps that’s the point. What Minority Rule and This Is Only the Beginning share is not a solution, but a refusal to forget. They insist that the moment we lived through, from Millbank to Momentum, from Grenfell to Glastonbury, was real, and that its lessons must not be lost.
But memory without organisation is nostalgia.
And those lessons have relevance beyond Britain. The global left’s lost decade—2015 to 2025—was not just a British story. Across Europe and North America, movements that rose in the wreckage of 2008 failed to consolidate power. Podemos has withered, Syriza was absorbed by the state, Bernie Sanders lost, twice. Even the U.S. Squad, once hailed as the insurgent vanguard, have been forced to retreat into legislative marginality under a Trump restoration.
And yet, something stirs. Just this month, Sanders and AOC began a series of roadshows across the United States aimed at resisting the deepening authoritarianism of Trump’s second term. Their message, partly defensive, partly hopeful, is that the left cannot win without rebuilding popular institutions of political education and resistance. Town halls, union drives, student assemblies: these are not relics, but prerequisites. Of course, we all know the Democrats, the party machine, will not allow Sanders or AOC to succeed. That possibility has been structurally foreclosed. But that’s not quite the point. If the return of Trump has thrown liberals into panic, it has forced the left into rethinking its foundations.
That rethinking is underway here too, if you look closely. Not in the Labour Party, which under Starmer has embraced the technocratic fatalism of late Blairism, but in the fragments: housing co-ops, strike funds, radical media, community organising. Novara Media, where Sarkar made her name, stands as a contradictory case. Founded as a project of post-Occupy Marxist speculation, it became a Corbynite mouthpiece, then a culture war lightning rod, and now something more uncertain. The question is whether it can become what the moment demands: not a brand, but an institution, one capable of surviving defeat, refusing spectacle, and training cadres rather than curating clicks. While it still produces some excellent content and sharp commentary, it is also very much part of the problem. Bastani and others have a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way; the tone can veer towards smugness; and its orientation remains more reactive than revolutionary. While it still produces excellent content and sharp commentary, it is also very much part of the problem. Bastani and others have a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way; the tone can veer towards smugness; and its orientation remains more reactive than revolutionary. It is a platform that embodies the left’s unresolved contradictions—between mass and niche, analysis and performance, movement and media.
It has the aesthetic confidence of the Corbyn era, but lacks the strategic discipline that era demanded.
Because that, ultimately, is the unfinished business of the Corbyn moment. It was not just that we lost. It was that we were not ready to win. Sarkar’s generation, politicised by crisis, equipped with theory and aesthetic confidence, remains largely unequipped with organisation. Chessum’s generation, grounded in movement experience, found itself outflanked by the party machine. The task now is to bridge the two: to marry ideological clarity with strategic depth, to turn critique into capacity.
And yet, if there is a deeper failure at the heart of the Corbyn project, and perhaps of much of the left more broadly, it is this: we were too nice. Too willing to accommodate, to placate, to believe in the moral suasion of our ideas rather than the ruthless application of power. Corbynism attempted to reconcile with the Labour right when it should have crushed it. The saboteurs were not persuaded, they were emboldened. The left wanted to be inclusive; the right wanted to win. It still does.
“The American right understands power. The British left, too often, only understands principles.”
Across the Atlantic, Trumpism has returned not only with electoral force but with a blueprint—Heritage 2025, a systematic plan to gut the state, purge the civil service, and consolidate permanent authoritarian rule. One does not have to admire the content to learn from the form. The American right, for all its incoherence, understands power. The British left, too often, only understands principles.
Trump has a plan. The left has memories, and vibes.
There is, still, a real minority in charge. The question, still, is whether we can take power from them, not symbolically, not rhetorically, but actually. Sarkar and Chessum cannot answer that question. But they compel us to keep asking it. And in a moment when forgetting has become a reflex, the act of remembering may be our most radical weapon.
“And in a moment when forgetting has become a reflex, the act of remembering may be our most radical weapon.”
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