This Is Why the Right Are Winning

“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. By 2018 she was making headlines for calling Piers Morgan an “idiot” on morning TV.

Now she has written her first book, Minority Rule, which chronicles the rise of identity politics – on the left and the right – and how social attitudes changed as our economic model became ever more rigged over the 2010s.

In a head-to-head with her fellow Downstream host Aaron Bastani, she unpacks the big questions animating her book: Have identity politics been damaging for progressive politics? What does ‘idpol’ get right? And what does left-wing politics look like now that ‘woke capitalism’ has subsided?