Ahead of Ash Sarkar visiting Cardiff’s Glee Club for a live show based around her 2025 book Minority Rule – itself an extension of her political activism and journalism with Novara Media – she tells John-Paul Davies that it’s time for us to look beyond hyped headlines and create a community of political consciousness.
Precisely 12 months after its publication, Ash Sarkar’s excellent book Minority Rule: Adventures In The Culture War (reviewed here) is being reprinted with a new afterword – an attempt, you suppose, to make sense of a seemingly insane year of international politics that has passed in the meantime.
Book tours like the one being undertaken to promote this new edition, which includes a stopoff for Sarkar at the Glee Club in Cardiff, are wonderful, free-flowing, conversational opportunities to build rapport with like-minded left-wingers – or so you might imagine. But, Sarkar tells me, she finds those who lean right are often more keen to engage with the left than vice versa.
“If you’re right-wing, you tend to be interested in debate. The thing I think would surprise right-wing people about [Minority Rule] is that I really do take its political figures and strategists seriously. So there’s a long interview with Dominic Cummings – that was a really important part of the book to me, because who’s the person who has tried to design the era that we live in?”
Sarkar also sought out Piers Morgan – with whom she had a notorious spat (“I’m literally a communist, you idiot!”) on Good Morning Britain, the best part of a decade ago – for the book. “That interview is trying to take someone’s work seriously: why do you do the things that you do? How do you think about it? What’s the thought process that goes into every piece of content that you make? I think entering an interview as an evangelist is a really bad approach.
“So hopefully, right-wingers will see there’s some genuine curiosity there; even though there isn’t agreement, there is an attempt to engage in good faith and to take people on their own terms a bit.”
The real issue that Sarkar wants to broach, more than political polarisation, is mass media misinformation. The general public, she says, need to “look not just at what a politician is doing, but essentially what the capitalist class is doing: the people who are in charge of the world’s biggest companies. What are they thinking?
“That gives you a much better steer on what’s going to happen, rather than what Robert Peston or Laura Kuenssberg are saying. If you want to understand politics, 90 to 95% of political journalists you can just safely ignore. Listening to them will actually inhibit your understanding of what’s going on.”
Which, after a year of madness, begs the question: what is going on? “[Britain has] become a vassal state to America. We de-industrialized; we sold off everything of value to multinational corporations who came to pick at the bones like vultures. Because we don’t have an industrial strategy of our own, and we’re running out of ways to be relevant.”
But what is going to be very relevant – to, potentially, the future of politics across the UK – is the next Senedd election this May.
“Wales is going to have the most interesting elections in the entirety of the UK this year,” reckons Sarkar. “You’ve got a two-horse race between Plaid and Reform: huge stakes for both parties. This could be a breakthrough for Plaid equivalent to what 2015 was for the SNP. Welsh Labour has been synonymous with incompetence, mismanagement and corruption. I think there’s also been a huge, insulting, level of complacency from Welsh Labour, viewing itself as being entitled to people’s votes.
“But already, Reform have had to put up tax in the 12 councils that they run despite saying that they’re not going to do it. If they do well in Wales this May, they’re going to have to run an NHS. And if they go into [the] 2029 [general election], having put up council tax all over the shop and having potentially mismanaged an entire health service in Wales, the extent to which that’s going to punish them will depend almost entirely on how much London-based media is willing to cover it.”
Ash Sarkar: In Conversation, Glee Club, Cardiff, Bay, Wed 4 Mar
Tickets: £22.50/£10 low income. Info: here
A new paperback edition of Minority Rule is published by Bloomsbury on Thurs 26 Feb. Info: here
words JOHN-PAUL DAVIES
