Latest news with #MinorityRule
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
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar
The British left used to be a force to reckon with. Edward Heath's government was famously felled by the miners in 1974 – the only instance in postwar European history when working-class power resulted in the overthrow of a ruling party. These days, however, the concept of the working class has an almost retro feel. Trade union membership has plummeted. Expressions of collective solidarity have likewise vanished. Disaffection has far from disappeared, only now it manifests in the form of petty crime and race riots. In Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar blames the rightwing press for this shift. Thanks to tabloid agents provocateurs and their political creatures in Westminster, she says, the lower orders have abandoned class war for the culture wars. Accordingly, more and more of them spend their weekends not on the barricades but behind computer screens, fuming over small boats and gender ideology. Sarkar's thesis, that fears of minority rule of one kind (by the non-white and non-binary) serve to legitimate minority rule of another sort (by barons and billionaires), isn't an earth-shattering observation, of course. As early as the 1890s, Friedrich Engels argued that the gullible and easily distracted working classes were conspiring in their own oppression; he called it 'false consciousness'. All the same, she prosecutes her case with more panache and punchiness, more hilarity, than is usual from the dour quarters of British political punditry. Her hyper-caffeinated prose and acid observations are unquestionably a joy to read. Here she is on a leafy enclave in Islington: 'Ocado delivery vans glided serenely through the streets … A moment of eye contact with a chic young mum improved my credit rating.' Sarkar reserves some of her snarkiest comments for left-liberals seduced by identity politics. Instead of uniting minorities and the proletariat into an ecumenical alliance of the oppressed, she says, the present-day left has pitted them against one another in an Olympics of victimhood. She goes to a crankish conference in Liverpool where a speaker declares, to nods of approval, that 'we should dismantle all our movements that aren't majority people of colour'. This in a country that is over 80% white. Sarkar is right: this stuff is just 'bananas'. People in these circles are, of course, quite justified in being exercised by racial oppression. But they are often less interested in remedying it collectively than claiming it individually. Some rather absurd propositions have flowed from this habit of mind. We meet the online commentators who argue that Anne Frank had 'white privilege'. Then we have the 'decolonising' yoga teacher who declares that 'white-led yoga spaces' are 'traumatising for people of colour'. Or take this tetchy response by a Jewish comedian to a tweet by an Arab-Australian Muslim poet claiming that Jesus resembled his family: 'He's not just claiming Jesus as a brown person: he's claiming him. Which, however you look at it – and however correct it is that Jesus was Middle Eastern – tramples on his Jewishness.' Mired in fratricidal identitarianism, left-liberals have lost the argument to the hard right, which has repurposed class politics with a racial tinge. So it is that yesterday's 'chavs' have been re-baptised as the 'white working class'. Google's Ngram viewer shows the inversion in their lexical fortunes since 2000. In the early years of this century, Sarkar observes, it was perfectly acceptable to portray the working classes as disgusting chavs, egregiously reckless with money and 'suspiciously interested in black culture'. To the journalist James Delingpole, writing in the Times, they were 'dismal ineducables', and 'pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who'll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye'. That was in 2006. Fast-forward to 2017, and Delingpole had recast himself as a tribune of the left-behind, railing against the 'liberal elite … which thinks it's perfectly acceptable, desirable even, to pour scorn and bile on the white working class'. Where chavs were once lazy and stupid, the white working class is decent, hardworking and yes, bigoted, though its bigotry turns on 'legitimate concerns'. Courted hard by the Tories, the white working class was hoisted by its own petard. Its support proved crucial in electing a succession of governments that first imposed a hostile environment towards migrants and then extended the same treatment to poor British people; some 120,000 excess deaths were directly attributable to austerity. Sarkar's counsel, that the left ought to quit whingeing and get its act together, is welcome. Yet I'm sceptical about her implicit assumption – that an alliance between minorities and the left is the natural state of things. I'm a Marxist like Sarkar, but I think it is at least worth recognising that British Indians, Pakistanis and Nigerians can be reactionary conservatives; a great many are. To pretend that they never hold to casteism, misogyny or homophobia is foolish. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Sarkar says that Britain's 'thin-skinned, thick-witted' political class has an unhealthy obsession with the media. The same charge can be levelled at her. This is the work of someone who has evidently spent far too much time on X; indeed, she cultivates the image of a sassy social commentator, a sort of Tariq Ali of looking at your phone a lot. Truth be told, it's not so much the leader writers of the Tory press who are in charge of the country as more impersonal, structural forces. Clinton's political adviser James Carville – no Marxist – recognised this in the late 90s: 'I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope. But now I would like to come back as the bond market.' 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.
