Latest news with #AshSarkar
Telegraph
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The woke institutions backpedalling on trans ideology owe the public a huge apology
Elton John once sang that 'sorry seems to be the hardest word': he was referring to a love affair gone wrong, but those words seem apt when we now see all the backpedalling going on around trans rights. It is obvious that certain trans activists, and those who have trans-ed their own children, will never back down from their cult-like beliefs that a mystical 'gender identity' is always more important than biological sex. But now that this belief lies in tatters in mainstream thinking, we are now in the era of those who promoted trans ideology, stepping back from it in awkward regret, trying to rewrite their history. For years we've had to contend with years of woe-fully inaccurate news reporting when it comes to trans-related crimes. In a story about a registered sex offender who was born a man being jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi, the BBC, Metro and the local press all referred to the perpetrator in their headlines as a woman, or she, alongside a picture of a man. It was enough to make you roll your eyes. Even in court, this person was referred to as 'she'. A lot has been said about media distrust. But this constant reporting of the crimes of men, but attributed to women, is but one of the issues that the public has finally become alert to. The unfairness of male-born trans competitors in women's sport is another. That so many of our public institutions have gone along with this nonsense is evidence of the power of lobby groups. It is also an indication of how poorly valued women's rights are. None of the institutions that have now retreated from the vice-like grip of these campaigning organisations (Stonewall, Mermaids), have apologised for being in thrall to this dangerous ideology. In employment tribunal after tribunal, women who have refused to say that men are women have been bullied out of their jobs but won their cases. Who has said sorry to them? Meanwhile those interested in reality have been proved right by the Cass Review. Guess what? Puberty blockers that inevitably lead to cross-sex hormones are not the best way to treat psychologically distressed kids. Now we have the Sullivan Review, which emphasises the importance of recording biological sex and gender as two different things. This matters for health and criminal records. To muddle them does no favours to trans people. A trans man still needs cervical smears, a trans woman prostate checks, and no Alphabetti Spaghetti lanyard changes that reality. Coming up are a spate of books that try to pretend that somehow the woke have actually 'woken up'. They range from Ash Sarkar's Minority Rule (the identity politics Ash pushed so hard were unappealing to many) to Deborah Francis-White's Six Conversations We Are Afraid to Have (hint: she is still afraid). Yet both show they cannot detach themselves from trans ideology because it is still their core belief. One can see the same kind of pathetic denial in the Democrat party. It was always bizarre to be lectured by American feminists on how trans rights were exactly the same as reproductive rights when here we have abortion rights and trans healthcare on the NHS, while they were losing abortion rights and don't even have maternity leave. The Democrat position is finally being questioned by brave detransitioners and by those looking at the actual medical evidence, which has made so many European countries pull back from medicalising children. In truth, this 'movement' was always a forced coalition between male fetishists and distressed teenage girls. If gender identity was someone's true identity suppressed for years, why do we find it mostly in middle-aged men who finally get to wear frilly knickers? Was this absurdity not obvious? We do not suddenly have a generation of middle-aged women declaring themselves to be men. The best we can manage is some attention-seeking actresses having a haircut and declaring themselves 'non-binary'. To mistake a fetish for a civil rights movement was a gross error. The much-discussed scene in the new White Lotus series, when a character realises that what he desires ultimately is to have sex with himself, but as a woman, makes this clear. The term for this is autogynephilia, and it is all over social media. Half these men don't even want to be women. They want to be 'little girls'. Sadly, actual girls who fear becoming adult women in our pornified culture often turn out to be simply gay. The blatant homophobia of the whole trans rights movement is astonishing. The radical position would be to extend our definitions of masculinity and femininity, not push people into these awful pinks and blue boxes. The infantile pink and blue trans flag says it all. These beliefs have been deeply embedded into academia, the Civil Service, the NHS, the arts: so many of our institutions have abandoned critical thinking in favour of fashion. Yet most of the public never really have bought into this ideology. Most of us have wanted the gender dysphoric to get the help they need, but want women to retain their own rights, spaces and language. There is now a long walk back from this idiocy. The public are not fools. No, female medics should not have to get undressed in front of biological males. No, women should not get punched in the face by those who refuse to take a simple sex test. No, a nurse dealing with a huge paedophile should not be racially abused and reported because she wouldn't use the 'right' pronouns. I don't expect any apologies for losing work and 'friendships' for arguing that biology is real. But there are many, many good folks who refuse to be airbrushed out of history. They stood up when it mattered. And you may not believe me but when I see what is going on in America, one of the saddest aspects of all this is that those most harmed by ramming trans ideology down everyone's throat have been trans people themselves. The backlash they now face is the result of the liberal failure to think for itself. For that, someone really does need to say sorry.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘I have a pathological need to be right': Ash Sarkar on culture wars, controversy and Corbyn's lost legacy
'You're not going to believe me when I say this: I'm a conflict-averse person,' says Ash Sarkar. She's laughing as she says it. Even if I did believe her, a lot of people wouldn't. Over the past decade, Sarkar has built a reputation for bringing the fight, robustly defending her positions, and generally putting herself in the line of fire – on television panel discussions, on social media and in her journalism (for this paper and as a contributing editor at Novara Media, among others). Even her detractors would admit she's very good at it, cutting through the politicians' earnest bluster and articulating what's on ordinary people's minds – none of which has endeared her to the rightwing. Now Sarkar has annoyed the leftwing as well. In her new book Minority Rule, she contends that embracing identity politics and culture wars has not always served the working class well. 'By making a virtue of marginalisation, breaking ourselves down into ever smaller and mutually hostile groupings, we make it impossible to build a mass movement capable of taking on extreme concentrations of wealth and power,' she writes. Policing language and embracing concepts such as 'lived experience' and 'white privilege' has discouraged solidarity and alienated would-be allies. If she was looking to avoid conflict, this is a curious way to go about it. Such sentiments could be seen as throwing her allies under the bus and giving her opponents plenty of ammunition, hence the recent Daily Telegraph headline The Queen of woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling left. The implication is that Sarkar adopted identity politics when it suited her in the past, but is now reversing her position. Sarkar doesn't see it like that. 'There are obviously things that I've shifted on,' she says when we meet. 'I definitely had that phase in my early 20s of being, like, [she points around the room] 'White privilege, white privilege, white privilege.' You could point at a floor lamp and be like, 'Neo-colonial ideology.' In part that's to do with being an arts and humanities graduate, where you are trained to look at everything as language and narrative and discourse … but this idea that I was somebody who was advancing a narrative around hypersensitivity and saying it's a good thing, I don't think really fits the facts.' What she is arguing for is less a 180-degree pivot than a return to first principles. 'I see it as a way to reflect on the last 15-odd years and say: 'What happens if I try to look at this through a rigorously materialist lens?' So that doesn't mean throwing away anti-racism or pretending that everybody has the same experience of society but looking at the economic forces in society, the way in which politics is mediated through institutions of legacy media, social media, and saying: 'Where does that get me?'' Understandably, the 'woke is dead' aspect of Sarkar's book has been seized upon by her detractors; less so the part where she lays out how the right has weaponised identity politics, and done a few 180-degree turns of its own when it suits it. For example, she chronicles how in the early 2000s, the rightwing media were only too happy to brand swathes of the country as 'chavs' and 'benefit scroungers' – or as one broadsheet columnist called them, 'lard-gutted slappers' and 'dismal ineducables' – as epitomised by Little Britain's Vicky Pollard caricature (a dim-witted teenager in a pink shell suit with multiple babies of varying ethnicities). But some time around 2015, this exact same demographic somehow morphed into 'the white working class' – decent folk who had been left behind by forces beyond their control, including preferential treatment for other marginalised groups: immigrants, black and brown people. Sarkar is by no means the first person to recognise that identity politics can end up building barriers rather than bridges between groups who really ought to be on the same side. Or that whenever the working class gets together and gains some power, it is met with opposition – Thatcherism versus the unions, for example, or the shift from heavy industry (which brought diverse employees together) to more atomising, isolating gig-economy jobs like Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers. 'I don't think that it's a case of, 'we all spontaneously became shit leftists',' she says. 'I think that there's been 45 years of economic forces preying on us to turn us into different kinds of people.' Sarkar, 32, has not been a mere spectator to this recent history; she has been an active part of it – albeit, in her telling, an almost accidental one. She never wanted to be a journalist, let alone on TV, she says. Born and raised in north London, daughter to a single mother, she studied English literature at University College London and imagined going on to do a PhD, but in 2011 her friends James Butler and Aaron Bastani founded the independent leftwing organisation Novara Media, initially as a community radio show. 'I had all these suggestions for them of things they should cover, and I think I could be quite annoying when I was telling them: 'You should look at this thing; what about this that's happening in Baltimore?'' So Bastani put her on the show. They were the 'downwardly mobile, socially liberal' generation who were 'radicalised' by tuition fees, trade unionists and the old Labour left, she says. And when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, buoyed by the swelling ranks of the Labour-left Momentum movement, there was a sudden demand from the media for voices like theirs. 'There weren't very many labour MPs who wanted to go out to bat for him because they fucking hated the guy.' She seemed to take to television like a fish to water – as illustrated by her viral moment in 2018 where she closed down an argument with Piers Morgan with the immortal line, 'I'm literally a communist.' (In a nutshell, Morgan was accusing her of being 'pro-Obama' on account of her criticism of Trump; Sarkar was pointing out she had criticised Obama, too). She's been a fixture of discussion shows ever since, where she's often applauded for saying what the other pundits and politicians won't, with clarity and intelligence but also wit. 'The reason why that's possible is because I don't like these people,' she says. 'I don't want to be friends with them. I don't want to go to Ed [Balls] and Yvette [Cooper]'s for dinner.' The high point of that period was the 2017 general election, post-Brexit referendum, in which Corbyn exceeded expectations, gaining 30 seats, and Theresa May's Conservatives lost their outright majority. 'I was 25,' Sarkar writes, 'and certain that the left was on the brink of making history.' Two years later, though, Boris Johnson swept to a landslide victory in the 2019 election, and Corbyn himself was history. She describes the difference between those two elections as 'night and day'. The summer of 2017 was glorious, she recalls. It was the year crowds were chanting 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!' at Glastonbury. 'There was optimism, there was joy, and there was a sense of a big 'us' that was being brought together,' she says. 'And I think that, because it was so dizzying, it was difficult to see your own weaknesses: who's not being brought along? Who don't you have? … I think that so many of us were blind to what was going to come next, which was a populist reinvention of the right.' We don't need to relitigate that Brexit-warped period of political history in detail, but as one of Corbyn's key allies and campaigners, she has had to accept that the summer of 2017 was as good as it was going to get for the Momentum left, and despite having 'won the argument', Corbyn was unable to build enough of a coalition to gain power. What went wrong? 'You can't make a leader anyone other than who they are,' says Sarkar. 'And Corbyn's instincts are to try and build some kind of consensus, compromise. He hates conflict. And you look at successful populists, whether they're on the right or the left, it could be [Brazil's leftwing president] Lula, it could be Nigel Farage … one of the things that all these people have in common is that they seek out conflict.' There is still room for a grassroots, anti-politics movement of the left, she says, but 'successful populists are like sharks,' she says. 'Blood in the water; they swim towards it, not away from it. And I think that if you're looking at any form of left populism, you need a leader like that – a mad bastard.' Something tells me Keir Starmer doesn't fit that bill for Sarkar. She sees him as 'a symptom of broken institutions. He's the result of the rightwing of the Labour party knowing that they couldn't have control of the party unless it was by deception.' She voted Green in the 2024 election, and has little positive to say about Starmer's reign so far. 'I can't hold much personal animus for him, because he's just a balloon in the shape of a man; it's other people's ambitions that have filled him up.' Let's see: someone who's quick-witted, media-literate and, despite protestations to the contrary, gravitates towards conflict. Is Sarkar putting herself forward for political life? 'God, no,' she says, nearly choking on her coffee. Her arguments against it are not particularly convincing: that journalists don't make good strategists; that the answer to the problem of the left cannot be a graduate from London. But she doesn't completely rule it out. 'Maybe it's like having kids, and at some point hormones kick in and you really want it. But right now, I don't, really.' Sarkar really doesn't seek out conflict, she insists. 'I hate arguments in real life. If me and my partner [she is married but prefers to keep her private life private] are annoyed with each other, I do avoidance jiu-jitsu' and: 'If somebody sent me the wrong dish in a restaurant, I would eat it.' Work is something different, though. 'This job, or the way I am for the job, it's a reflection of things that I really feel and I really believe, but it's not a reflection of how I think about conflict at all.' And yet, she can't resist a good … exchange of ideas, let's say. Despite identifying social media and broadcast media as part of the problem in her book, Sarkar is still prominent on both – especially now she's got a book to promote. She has been an active presence on X/Twitter, where she has over 400,000 followers, for over a decade and she is still on there, often engaging one-to-one on issues such as immigration, race, Israel and Palestine, trans rights, you name it. 'My husband's always telling me, 'Put the crack pipe down,' but I can't,' she admits. 'I have a pathological need to be right, and it's so easy to derail me by making me feel like I've got an argument to win.' She says she loves the concise format of X, likening it to joke-writing or the quippy pop culture she grew up on, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or grime MCs battling it out. But as an opinionated, leftwing, Asian, Muslim woman, she receives more hateful comments than just about anyone – not just garden-variety trolling and insults but the ugliest forms of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and threats of violence. Does she read the comments? 'Yeah, I do. And I know I shouldn't.' Does it not get to her? 'Oh yeah. How do I put this … ?' She pauses, for pretty much the only time in the hour we've been talking. 'The stuff which is really racist or sexually intrusive, it feels like people are crawling all over your body. You play a role in other people's psyches, and you've got no control over that, over that version of you that's in their head.' She knows the sensible thing to do is log off. 'But where will I get my dopamine from then?' she says. She's only half joking. Whether or not Sarkar's book marks a change of direction in her beliefs, it feels like the summation of a tumultuous political era, one that has given rise to her own career. It almost feels as if she's about to embark on a new phase. So what's next? 'I have no idea,' she says. She talks of other book projects, and even training as a chef. 'My proudest boast is, I gave Nigella Lawson a recipe, and it was in her last cookbook.' But, as always, there's no strategic master plan. She's being led by her intuition, she says. 'I'll know what's next when I see it.' Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ash Sarkar blasts UK for following US 'like a little lapdog'
THE UK's defence policy has been left 'twisting in the wind' because the country has followed the US along 'like a little lapdog', journalist Ash Sarkar has said. Sarkar appeared on a panel on BBC Politics Live where guests were discussing whether America is 'destroying' the world order as we know it. Following an extraordinary clash in the White House between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, the US President has suspended military aid to Ukraine and has paused intelligence sharing with the nation. When Sarkar was asked if she felt the US is destroying the world order, she said she found it appalling the UK had 'paved the way' for the weakening of international law with its actions in Iraq in 2003. READ MORE: She also criticised how the UK had shaped its defence policy around the US, questioning why the country has two aircraft carriers which have been repeatedly mocked as being obsolete in the age of drones and hypersonic missiles. Sarkar said: 'Donald Trump's world view can be boiled down to this – he thinks there are three global apex predators: there's America, there's China and there's Russia. "We've spent decades following America along like a little lapdog hoping to get the crumbs from them," Novara Media's Ash Sarkar tells #PoliticsLivehttps:// — BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) March 6, 2025 'When he says America First he doesn't mean America plus Ukraine, he doesn't mean America plus Britain, he means America first, America's interests first. 'For me the thing which, I think, is appalling about this situation is one, we have paved the way in many respects in weakening international law, so that's why you have Russia waging a war of aggression. 'I mean, we kind of did that first with Iraq. We led the way when it came to unlawful invasions on flimsy pretexts. 'The second thing is we have spent decades following America along like a little lapdog hoping to get the crumbs from them and shaping our defence policy around them.' (Image: Win McNamee, via REUTERS) Presenter Jo Coburn then pointed out the UK Government likely sees the US "as the most powerful country in the world". But Sarkar argued following the US had left the UK 'twisting in the wind' when it comes to defence. 'It's left us in a bad position,' she said. READ MORE: 'Why do we have two aircraft carriers? They're not useful for a land war in Europe. 'Russia doesn't have a single functioning aircraft carrier because they know what they're looking to do. We've got two aircraft carriers which were very expensive, came in 50% over budget, because we thought we'd have to follow America into a war in the Pacific. 'Now America's changed its geopolitical orientation, we've been left twisting in the wind.' Ukraine's ambassador to the UK and former military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said the US is "destroying" the established world order on Thursday. He said the White House had "questioned the unity of the whole Western world". He told an audience: "We see that it is not just the axis of evil and Russia trying to revise the world order, but the US is finally destroying this order." On Wednesday, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz confirmed the US had paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine. He added that the Trump administration was pausing and reviewing "all aspects of this relationship". The US has shared intelligence with Ukraine since the early stages of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. It paused military aid to Kyiv on Monday following a dramatic breakdown in relations in the Oval Office last week, when Zelenskyy was told to leave after an angry meeting with Trump in which the US President accused him of 'gambling with world war three'.
New European
04-03-2025
- Politics
- New European
How woke went broke
But there is a growing consensus that the worst vagaries of that era may be over. Leftist commentator Ash Sarkar argues in her new book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War that the left (including herself) may have gone too far on identity politics and culture war issues. Piers Morgan has a book due in October making a similar argument from a different perspective: Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness . And in the USA, where these issues took up far more time and oxygen than they ever did here, Donald Trump's administration could not be making it clearer that a certain version of wokeness is not just dead, but being buried at a crossroads with a stake in its heart. The reality, though, is that the most puritanical and extreme phase of wokeness/cancel culture burned brightly, but peaked years ago – if it were not well past its peak now, no one remotely adjacent to the left, let alone Sarkar herself, would dare to say so. It should not now be difficult to say that, for a time, the political left and mainstream, in response to deep and serious issues such as US police violence and structural racism in that country, reacted in extremely silly and puritanical ways. As tempting as it is to recast such movements as a plea to have a conversation about racism, to be a little kinder and more understanding and to challenge ourselves, at their peak these movements were not about that. The admission is necessary, if for no other reason than to notice how brief that period really was, and how the right wing 'backlash' to it is larger, more dangerous, and more sweeping than peak woke itself ever was. In theory, wokeness is distinct from the Black Lives Matter movement, which in turn is distinct from cancel culture, from the gender debate, and so on. Each has roots in different academic traditions, different inciting incidents. But for most people, the everyday experience of these movements simply melded into one. The peak coincided with a string of high-profile cancellations, some of them long overdue and much deserved and some simply bizarre. In February 2021, The New York Times made the questionable but defensible decision to get rid of Donald McNeil Jr after 45 years at the paper, because he had used America's vilest (and most charged) racial epithet during a discussion on whether it was ever permissible to use the word. Slate then in turn parted company with its podcast host Mike Pesca for simply questioning the firing during a Slack discussion, during which at no point did he use the slur (or even directly refer to it). His colleagues argued that the simple fact of him saying it should not necessarily be an automatic firing offence. Meanwhile, Slate had used the word in articles nine times in 2020 and three times in 2021 – not all written by black writers. For a time, significant airtime was given to the idea that only writers from particular ethnic groups should write about those groups, with some even challenging whether any interracial relationship (or even friendship) could be unproblematic. It seemed that the search for social justice was leading people towards voluntary segregation. 'Defund the police' was adopted as a slogan, with some in the movement condemning critics for taking the term literally, even as others insisted the slogan was very much literal. There are books covering the excesses of the time, and they do not need to be relitigated here, other than to note the chancers who jumped on the issue with solutions that conveniently boosted their own incomes. For a time Robin DiAngelo's egregious White Fragility book was an international bestseller – a nice earner for a white woman after a race relations crisis, while bizarre 'Race To Dinner' experiences, offered by the activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, played on the guilt of white women in bizarre ways. All of these examples, notably, are American: most of the inciting incidents of the great awakening were American, and most of its excesses stayed there. The most famous UK incident sparked by Black Lives Matter is probably when Edward Colston's statue was thrown into Bristol harbour. Given that the city's authorities were paralysed for years over the question of what to do with the statue of the notorious slaver, and that the statue didn't go back up but was instead displayed as part of an exhibition on protest in a nearby museum, this act has aged pretty well. But, for a while, the mood in the UK was strange. Keir Starmer might get occasional flak in 2025 for taking the knee in a photo with Angela Rayner in his office, but he attracted significant flak at the time for referring to BLM as a 'moment' rather than a 'movement' – a simple and true statement that has since been vindicated. He eventually had to apologise. All of these examples are from 2020 or 2021, for the simple reason that all of these social justice issues peaked back then. There was a time when everyone was either enthusiastically jumping on to these causes, or else keeping their heads down to avoid being called out or cancelled – but it didn't last long. The Democratic primary of 2020 happened at peak woke – and stances taken at that time plagued Kamala Harris through 2024's presidential race. But the party selected the least woke candidate in the race, Joe Biden, and the country elected him at the general election, over Trump, a rival much more engaged in culture warring. America's great corporations made great promises on 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI), wokeness, and made a show of reshaping their businesses after the reckoning. But they did not even come close to reshaping capitalism. They wore the cause as a fashion, and discarded it as the seasons changed. The social justice side of the culture wars won at best tepid and reluctant endorsement from institutional power – the Democrats half-heartedly embraced the movement, and Labour just as gingerly showed some solidarity over here. Corporations sounded receptive to the movements because it was good for business. But wokeness never got the institutional backing that movements need to become real institutional forces in business. The same cannot be said of the reactionary side of the culture wars, which have not so much been embraced by the Republican Party as they have engulfed it. The party of big business and small government that believes in the USA as the leader of the free world, has been replaced with a party obsessed with 'owning the libs'. Donald Trump's war on wokeness is totalitarian in its obsession. He is willing to cut vital medical research if it uses the wrong word, and to cut lifesaving aid programmes across the world if a 20-year-old idiot who impressed Elon Musk thinks it might look woke. Trump was willing to fire the eminently qualified chair of the joint chiefs of staff – the most senior general in the US military, and a former fighter pilot – because he once talked about being a black man in the military. He was replaced with a less qualified white man. All of this is vile, and much of it is dangerous. But it is also deeply self-defeating. They have misunderstood the reason BLM/wokeness/cancel culture was rejected by large parts of mainstream America. It was not because most Americans love overt racism, or hate gay or trans people. It was because when they saw theories like those of Ibram X Kendi, that everything must be either anti-racist or racist with nothing in between, they were (for good or ill) repelled. Most people want most of their lives to be apolitical, insofar as that is possible. Wokeness became totalitarian, and said every act must be political and any attempt to reject or deny this was itself political. From the moment it did this, it was on to a loser. Trump's reactionary movement is making the exact same mistake, and using the same totalitarian impulse to engage in much more blatant cruelty from a position of much more obvious power. When people see their friends being fired from government jobs because of a misguided war on woke, most will not cheer it on. The audience for deliberate cruelty against minorities is still, hopefully, far smaller than Trump's coterie imagine. The reactionary side of the culture war is in the ascendancy, and is more powerful than the social justice faction ever was, even at its peak. But fundamentally, the MAGA-ites fail to grasp that most people want to Make America Normal Again and that they don't want to worry endlessly about these culture war issues. In their excesses, they sow the seeds of their own destruction. But such downfalls do not always come quickly, let alone easily. The harm that may be inflicted in the meantime is almost incalculable. A focus on that is far more important than relitigating the worst excesses of the social justice movement.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Queen of woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left
In what can only be described as a quite spectacular Damascene conversion, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media has rejected identity politics and the competing grievances it has given rise to. In an interview with Lewis Goodall of The News Agents, Sarkar argued what many have been saying for years – that much of the America-brained British Left is destroying itself by embracing the politics of racial victimhood. This includes adopting divisive theories of so-called 'white privilege', with such toxic ideas spreading through the public, private, and third sectors, fuelled in part by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Much of this proved to be a complete distraction in one of the most racially fair societies on Earth, deflecting attention away from much stronger determinants of life chances such as modern Britain – such as family structure, community norms, and young people's accessibility to civic assets. Sarkar's apparent conversion is to be welcomed – as an old-school Leftist who has always believed that class has been left by the wayside when it comes to vital matters of social mobility, I passionately believe that the so-called 'woke' focus on racial identity has been destructive for both social policymaking and community relations at large. Indeed, recent research by Policy Exchange revealed that the majority of the British public – including ethnic minorities – believe that class is more important than race when it comes to people succeeding and doing well in Britain. Its report recommended that the Government and public bodies such as the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) ensure young people's development is primarily analysed through a class lens (not a racial one) and that there should be a particular focus on expanding opportunities for schoolchildren in left-behind areas to build social and cultural capital. Some may be cynical about Sarkar turning her back on identity politics. After all, she often defended BLM, with her Novara Media organisation striking parallels between the social movement and the politics of Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone with a basic understanding of the American civil rights movement would know that at the heart of his vision was a harmonious, post-racial American nation state which addressed rampant socio-economic inequalities in access to opportunities, high-quality public services, and private ownership. This is a far cry from what I have long considered to be segregationist tendencies at the heart of BLM-inspired racial identity politics. Sarkar's reckless forays into matters of integration include referring to Britain's so-called white-supremacist state. Novara once posted a video titled: The unbearable whiteness of Brexit. While Sarkar is now right to flag the corrosive effect of racial identity politics on social solidarity, this is quite a departure from her previous record. As such, some might be in an unforgiving mood. But Sarkar's public trashing of contemporary identity politics should be treated as a victory by those who have been challenging its toxic divisiveness for a long time. The politics of racial grievance is on the back foot – it is time to press home the advantage. Dr Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
