Ash Sarkar is a journalist, political commentator, activist and author, described by Naomi Klein as “one of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation”.

Never one to shy away from controversy, her first book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, examines the methods used by the ruling elite of hedge fund managers, press barons, corporations (and even private landlords) to keep the majority divided.

Ahead of her keynote session at this year’s HQN annual conference, she sits down with Jon Land to discuss the pressing issues of the day: the state of housing, the changing media view of the white working class, and why the current Labour government is “shit”.

Jon Land: Is it fair to say your book has had a mixed reception? Criticised by loud voices in the media, but loved by people who go into it with an open mind and actually sit down and engage with it?

Ash Sarkar: I don’t know. Maybe you’ve read more negative reviews than I have! My experience of the book coming out was that the responses could be categorised as fair criticisms from people who have really engaged with the ideas. And there’s something really great about writing a book. It’s very different from doing other forms of media. So, when you get those responses where people are saying “You could have taken your argument further here”, it doesn’t feel like an attack. It feels really creative and generative and good.

There were a couple of hatchet jobs – one was from the Murdoch-owned Times, and the other was somebody just insinuating that I might be an insincere grifter. When you’ve worked in the media for as long as I have, and you know how the game operates, if you didn’t get completely torn to shreds by your political opponents, you’d start to wonder if you’d lost it somehow – you’d lost the ‘sauce’.

I feel very positive about how it’s gone. And in particular, this period of time that I’m in right now, which is between the hardback and the paperback, you have the luxury of integrating people’s points of views and criticisms into the next thing that you’re writing. There’s somebody called Shanice McBean who wrote, I thought, a very good and engaged critique of the book.

JL: Why do you think you’re open to those type of hatchet jobs? Do you think it’s because you openly look at things from a Marxist perspective?

AS: One of the things that I say in the book is that politics is war by other means, and media is such a huge part of that. If you have a successful left-wing journalist and writer who’s connecting with a lot of people, that’s a threat to ruling class interests. The sections of media whose sole job is to represent those interests, will try and take your head off. I’m not the only person it happens to. I remember when Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party, there was a comment piece in the Telegraph, which was about him wearing a tie, and it said, “Jeremy Corbyn wearing a tie frightened me because that shows how hungry he is for power”. That’s the level of hatchet job that people on the left get from these sections of the media. So, it was completely expected, and I think the more frightening thing would’ve been to be ignored.

JL: You devote a whole chapter to ‘Planet Landlord’ and private landlords are a bit of a hate figure in the book. Can you expand on that for us a little bit? And what are your thoughts on social housing landlords compared to private landlords?

AS: The first thing is that whether you’re left wing or right wing, Marxist, conservative, liberal, social democrat, everybody thinks that hard work should be rewarded. Socially productive labour should be rewarded. I think lots of us also agree that there are really important jobs in this society which don’t get the reward or remuneration that they ought to: teachers, nurses, carers, cleaners.

I think we can also all agree that simply owning stuff isn’t really work. It’s not socially productive. In fact, it has all sorts of socially corrosive impacts. More than two million families have been locked out of homeownership because of buy-to-let landlords. Homeownership means security. It means stability. It means not having to move every 12 months. That’s millions of individuals and families who have been consigned to a more precarious existence because we’ve allowed housing stock to be used as a vehicle for profit.

“Sarah Pochin [Reform MP for Runcorn] was saying, ‘all of the new social housing is going to illegal immigrants’. She just pulled that out of the air. But it pops up nearly every week now, doesn’t it? That tells you something about the power of media, which is you repeat something until people feel it’s true, even if they can’t see it around them”

This model isn’t just in housing. We see it with utilities. I’m an unhappy customer of Thames Water, and the corporate owners of Thames Water, formerly Macquarie, all they did was move in, load the company with debt, extract heaps of money and dividends for shareholders, and then they just fucked off. I don’t think anyone would think that that’s socially productive or useful. It certainly hasn’t resulted in better water quality or better waterways for any of us.

In fact, we’re now dealing with the consequences of our bills being hiked to deal with this huge debt mountain. That’s the problem with the landlord model of an economy – it’s essentially parasitic, and it’s also uncompetitive because the inequality between the person who owns the thing and the person who needs the thing, that’s a power dynamic which can be endlessly exploited.

For many people in [rented] housing, the need for shelter means that even if technically their landlord is breaking the law, they don’t have the means or the recourse to do anything about it. Novara Media covered a story recently where a landlord who was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands in costs to his tenant is simply liquidating the company that owes them money so he can move on. That power imbalance is really baked in.

In terms of the difference between social housing landlords and private landlords – and I’m thinking here about the big housing associations and stuff like that – whilst they may be in some cases better, in some cases worse, I certainly think it’s a worse model than council housing and council ownership, because the lines of accountability are so much more opaque and complicated.

Was all council housing good? No, of course it wasn’t. But the system that’s replaced it has, I think, deliberately made things worse for tenants because there’s a sense that, “Well, these people shouldn’t really be here anyway”. Social tenants are treated very poorly.

The dynamics are different between private landlords and social landlords, but neither are that great. There’s this irony that sometimes a private landlord will be like, “I’ll send my son, Bonzo, around to fix it with a ladder and a blow torch”. And a social landlord will sometimes take months or even years to do the same job, depending on who you’ve got.

JL: So, if you were forced to choose, would you live in social housing, as we know it today, or the private rented sector?

AS: You’re talking to somebody who has a great deal of cultural capital. I’ve got university degrees, friends who are lawyers, I work in the media, my ability to navigate these bureaucracies is really good, and not because of reasons that I’ve earned. It’s because I’m middle class. So, in terms of a private landlord, I’d probably be better off.

JL: Because you can pay to live in a better quality property?

AS: Not only can I pay to live in a better quality house, I’ve got the social leverage to navigate a bad landlord. The thing about tenants who come from more deprived backgrounds, regardless of whether it’s dealing with a private landlord or a social landlord, is that these systems rely on all kinds of inequalities, and inequalities are a really important way in which people protect themselves, shield themselves from accountability.

JL: The term housing crisis has been bandied about for decades, but it seems to be worse than ever. The government is currently throwing money around to try and build more homes, but do you think that’s going to solve it? What would you do?

AS: To turn a Margaret Thatcher aphorism on its head, the problem with neoliberalism is that eventually you run out of public assets to put into private hands. That’s the problem that we’ve got at the minute, which is, it’s not that neoliberalism has led to a small state or small state expenditure. It’s just more of it is being syphoned off in the form of corporate profit and shareholder dividends. The model that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves want to use – which is “Okay, we’re going to flash a bit of ankle, so the likes of BlackRock want to come and invest” – is that we’re fast running out of assets that they’re going to want to buy. That’s the first issue with their entire way of thinking, that this is somehow going to stimulate growth. The second thing, and this is specific to housing, is that we’ve never seen the number of houses that this government want to build per year without a massive council housing project. We’ve just simply never had it. That’s obviously more difficult now when you think about how much room we have as a country. How little urban space there is left – how much urban sprawl has already happened. We’re in a different set of circumstances now in 2025 than we were immediately following 1945.

“The dynamics are different between private landlords and social landlords, but neither are that great. There’s this irony that sometimes a private landlord will be like, ‘I’ll send my son, Bonzo, around to fix it with a ladder and a blow torch’. And a social landlord will sometimes take months or even years to do the same job, depending on who you’ve got”

But the fact that you’ve had this grotesque inflation of land values – I mean, not only is it going to be the government spending money hand over fist, which is effectively our money, it’s lining the pockets of people who are often already very, very rich. Looking at land ownership in England and Wales, some 30% of it is still owned by the aristocracy. You’ve got vast swathes of it which are owned by city bankers and financiers. More government spending isn’t the only solution to the housing crisis. So, yes, council housing, which is a form of government expenditure, but it brings assets onto the government’s balance sheet as well. You’re also going to have to do something about land hoarding.

JL: In a hundred words or less, what are your thoughts on the current Labour government?

AS: Shit.

JL: One word. Impressive.

AS: Doomed, slow. That’s two more. If I were to put it in a real sentence, it would be this: Kier Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Morgan McSweeney – they only know how to do one thing, which is punch left to look credible to a centre-right audience, and they can do that very, very well. But that’s not a programme for government. If you look at where they’re being outflanked, it’s by Reform. Reform have outflanked them on welfare, on the nationalisation of British Steel and the nationalisation of water. That’s because, sure, they’ve got the luxury of not being in government, but also they know where there are votes to be had. Starmer and Reeves created a rod for their own backs with these fiscal rules and they’re now facing a self-imposed crisis of credibility. That’s possibly more than 100 words at this point, but I just think Starmer and Reeves are very, very bad at politics.

JL: I’m interested in exploring the apparent shift in the media/political view of how the white working class is portrayed now, to, say, 15 years ago, and what’s behind this. And is it really just a culture wars thing? Do you see it as one of the key factors that ultimately will see Reform win the next election?

AS: I think it’s a big part of it. What will be interesting to see is to what extent Reform are able to pull off something like Donald Trump did in the last election, which is (in US terms) being able to win over votes not just non-college-educated whites, but also non-college-educated Hispanics and Black people as well. In this country, the more relevant ethnic groups are, of course, British Asian and British Afro-Caribbean. That’s something to keep an eye on.

In terms of the white working class, I was born in ‘92, so I’m properly a child of the 2000s. That was when I was growing up. That’s all the music I still like. I still think it was the pinnacle of Western civilisation. I remember the contempt with which people who were white and working class were held.

They weren’t called white working class or smushed together. In fact, these people were seen as being too close to ethnic minority communities. If you were a white kid and you were hanging around a shopping centre, wearing a hoodie and you liked rap music, you were considered scum of the Earth. I always remember Vicky Pollard with the pram of 10 babies, and they’re all different races. The narrative that was portraying was, “You know what’s more disgusting than a white woman who’s poor? A white woman who’s poor and has sex with men of colour”. That was the whole joke.

I think this reached a crescendo with the 2011 riots, because how many people in the media were making sense of the fact that it wasn’t just Black and Asian young people that you saw in the streets, although there were a lot. You also saw young white working class kids. They tried to explain it solely through cultural means, basically hoodies and hip hop all over again. Then around that time, shortly afterwards, you started to see a shift.

I think that 2015, 2016 was really important for this because you could no longer do the New Labour playbook of ‘everyone’s middle class now’, because after the 2008 financial crisis, the social mobility train stopped running. You’re working class forever, sorry. I also think that Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party was a factor. He put together an electoral coalition of working class people of many ethnicities. You’ve also got Brexit – hugely significant.

You got a sense that for a ruling class that wants to maintain the status quo, and one where nobody thinks that the lot of working class and impoverished people is going to ever improve, we’ve got to change tack. There’s a wonderful quote from a novel called The Leopard, which is: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.”

Instead of saying, “Okay, working class people, you’re all scum”, it went, “Working class people, you see all these ethnic minorities, they’re the ones who’ve screwed you over. They’ve done it through culture, they’ve done it through demographics, their interests are inherently competing with yours”. That’s such a shift from the discourses of the early 2000s, which was saying, “Look at you, you’re all the same, and that’s what’s disgusting about you”.

JL: Just to take it a little bit further in terms of the social housing context. We still talk about stigma being attached to tenants and the supposed link to benefits, the something for nothing culture. But do you think this conversation has also shifted? Is it more about the perception/outright lie that the white working class can’t get access to social housing because it’s given to ethnic minorities and asylum seekers, specifically? Do you think the nature of stigma is changing in terms of social housing?

AS: What’s interesting about studying that period of the 2000s is that the language you use to stigmatise asylum seekers on Monday, you find applied to people who are white and working class on Tuesday. So, ideas find their origin in one place and then they broaden out. I think in terms of the myth of the benefit scrounger, and it is a myth, so many studies have been done that show that the scale of benefits fraud is actually very small. Similarly, the levels of intergenerational worklessness are quite marginal. These myths persist even amongst people who are definitely working class.

I can think about members of my own family who are still employed in manual heavy industry. One of the things that you often hear them saying is, “Well, I work hard, but here’s this person who I can picture in my head who’s doing nothing and getting something”.

The asylum seeker issue – it’s astonishing how close we are right now to what we were hearing 20 years ago. So, Sarah Pochin, the recently elected Reform MP for Runcorn, was saying, “All of the new social housing is going to illegal immigrants”. She just pulled that out of the air. But it pops up nearly every week now, doesn’t it? That tells you something about the power of media, which is you repeat something until people feel it’s true, even if they can’t see it around them. They’ll find their perceptions are warped until it fits the picture that they get from the newspapers.

An example I give in the book is in the early 2000s, during the local elections in Broxbourne, which is where the BNP got one of their first council seats. You had residents in Broxbourne saying, “I’m sick of seeing asylum seekers strolling into the Post Office picking up their giro”. It turns out there were no asylum seekers in Broxbourne.

JL: A couple of personal questions just to finish, if that’s okay. Where do you see Ash Sarkar in five years’ time?

AS: You know what? I’m terrible at imagining my own future, and I always have been. My partner is somebody who’s got a real five-year plan. He can say, I want to do this by this time, this by this time, this by another time. Whereas I’m so gut-led. I just think, what feels right? What do I enjoy doing? I can’t tell you where I want to be in five years’ time but the thing which feels really important to me currently is continuing to build up the institution of Novara Media. We live in an era where it encourages people to build up big private followings for themselves. It’s an influencer model of contesting politics. The thing which I talk about in the book is that there’s no unit less powerful than the individual. Because I can get hit by a bus, I can get cancelled, I can do something really stupid, which takes me out of the game in its entirety. It’s very difficult to do that with an organisation of 25 people. That’s one of the things that’s really important to me.

JL: Finally, as a Spurs fan, were you sorry that Ange got the boot?

AS: I’m so glad someone’s asking the questions that matter. I was really sad about it. And I know that this isn’t reasonable. I know that 17th place is unconscionable. And I also know that there’s a way in which he didn’t fulfil his promise. We thought what we were going to get was this super tactical strategy-led manager. Instead, we got someone who was able to improve the vibes of the club, – we felt like we enjoyed the football we were watching (at least for the first six months) and then we got a trophy. So, maybe Thomas Frank can be the guy who’s actually going to be really tactical. But it’s been 17 years since we won a trophy. You owe him to start the next season. You see him one day crying with the trophy in front of thousands of adoring fans, and then they get rid of him the following week. I think we owed him better. I was really looking forward to next season being the one where we got relegated but won the Champions League.