A quarter of a century ago, the British Cabinet’s Policy Unit, led by new Prime Minister Tony Blair, discussed immigration. The subtext was that the New Labour government was trying to confront critics, both on the right and on the old trade union left. The policy documents on the table had “a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural”, and more: they were going “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”(Evening Standard, 23 October 2009).
It was not just the Conservative right that were the target of this drive. The recruitment of workers from overseas was a way of undermining organized labour at home: unorganized foreign workers could be hired to do the work that was formerly done by union members. Blair’s government set out to unpick the post-war social contract between British workers and their employers, a structure that they blamed for Britain’s low productivity. The workforce continued to grow from 30-34 million between 2000 and 2025, in part due to net migration of around 100 000 a year, while union membership continued to slide from eight to six million, and labour’s share of the national income failed to increase.
These signal changes in the way that the UK economy works could have featured in Ash Sarkar’s recent book Minority Rule, as a pointed demonstration of her thesis that the elite “rule, by keeping us divided and competing against one another” and “sustain a deeply unequal status quo”. Throughout, however, Sarkar dismisses the concerns of the white working class in Britain as illusionary, misconceived, or even “weaponised”. Where Sarkar relates every other change to exploitative capitalism, she insists that “demographic change is a fact of human existence”.
Sarkar dismisses the concerns of the white working class in Britain as “weaponised”. Where she relates every other change to exploitative capitalism, she insists that “demographic change is a fact of human existence”.
Talking about the idea of race, Sarkar writes that “it’s a mistake to cling to the idea of race as an identity”, and goes on to explain, reasonably enough, that there are not really such things as races in biology, but that races are in fact social categories that not only misrepresent but lend themselves to divisive and reactionary politics—“racism’s diabolical grip on our lives and politics”. So far, so good. But strangely, when some commentators map out the goal of a post-racial politics, Sarkar is unsympathetic. “By wrongly declaring the end of racism, [author Dinesh] D’Souza actually helped create the political cover needed for racism to reinvent itself once more”. What Sarkar will not engage with is the statistical evidence that race discrimination is greatly mitigated in Britain. Discrimination in employment and the ethnic pay gap are far less than they were.
For Sarkar, race, far from being a passing illusion, “is as stubborn as knotweed, permeating the centuries … adapting itself to its context in order to survive for another generation”. Unreal, but on the other hand perennial—it seems that Sarkar is not really willing to let go of the idea of race as an identity.
For Sarkar, race is both “unreal” and “perennial”— it seems that she is not willing to let go of the idea of race as an identity.
Sarkar’s insistence that racism is perennial sees her pathologizing whiteness. There’s a mea culpa in the book about something she had said on a video clip about integration between races. In passing she made the point that the white English population had gone up by only 600,000, while the ethnic minority population had gone up 1.2 million, and then in aside to the camera: “Yes, lads, we’re winning”. It was a joke, she now explains. And fair enough—it is quite a funny joke, as if the non-white population was going out of its way to out-breed the white. But Sarkar then goes on to pour scorn on anyone who says that there might be problems facing the white population, too. “The only reason people are talking about the white working class at all is to hit back at decades of progress made in the recognition of racial justice”, she insists. It is a peculiarly cloth-eared approach. As Sarkar sees it, the white working class are not losing out because they are white, but because they are working class. It is not conceivable to her that anyone would discriminate against white people. But plainly people in positions of authority do have prejudices about white Brits—that they are bigoted and stupid, and wholly to blame for their problems. But here’s the thing—in Britain the working class is white, for the most part. Out of 30.5 million in work, 26 million are white. When you make “whiteness”, or “the white working class” into a problem, the people you are in fact pathologizing are the working class.
