“I’m literally a communist, you idiot”. For almost a decade Ash Sarkar has been one of Britain’s most prominent left wing political journalists. She first met Aaron Bastani in 2010, and was later invited on to the Novara FM podcast. It wasn’t long before she was calling Piers Morgan an idiot on morning TV.
Now she has written her first book, ‘Minority Rule’. It chronicles the rise of identity politics – left and right – and how social attitudes changed as our economic model became ever more rigged over the 2010s. Has identity politics been damaging for progressive change? What does it get right? And what does left-wing politics look like in a moment when ‘woke capitalism’ has subsided?