A timely morality tale: The Spoiled Heart, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

Who would have thought that the battle between champions of old-school socialism and contemporary identity politics for the post of General Secretary of Unify, a fictitious British trade union, would make for such riveting reading?

Nayan Olak and Megha Sharma have little in common save their skin colour. He is the son of corner shopkeepers, who started work on the factory floor at 16 and is now the union’s Head of Workplace Disciplinary Actions. She is the daughter of a non-dom property magnate and recently appointed Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Their political priorities are neatly encapsulated in their job titles.

While never explicitly favouring either candidate, Sunjeev Sahota makes his own sympathies clear by showing how Megha wilfully misrepresents both Nayan’s actions and arguments (not the only occasion in the novel when a man is brought down by what Nayan describes as ‘typical private-school, entitled shit’) and by Nayan’s heartfelt pleas for working people to stand together against those ‘who would create splits, based on our background, our gender, even our race’.