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Daily Mirror
18-05-2025
- Daily Mirror
Just Stop Oil activists boast of cushy treatment from prison guards
Members of Just Stop Oil claim prison officers are more lenient, grant them special privileges and even support their efforts to combat the climate crisis - just days after eight members dodged jail Just Stop Oil activists have revealed they're getting cushy treatment behind bars. The eco activists said prison guards were being more lenient toward them, and even granted them special privileges. One claimed officers supported the group, often congratulating their efforts to combat the climate crisis. Our revelation comes hours after eight members, who tried to cause travel disruption at Heathrow last summer, were spared jail. Speaking on the Novara Media podcast, protester George Simonson, who caused traffic chaos on the M25 after climbing a gantry, said: "The guards treat us with more respect and it's been easier for me to get certain privileges than other people. "When prison guards find out why I'm here, they will say 'look - I'm not allowed to say what I think but good on you - or, like, it's a cause I really respect - you're paying the price and thank you'. Others have said I shouldn't be in here, and that kind of thing." George, released earlier this year, also told how he was granted 'enhanced status', which allows prisoners more time outside of their cells each day. Nine activists were sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court in west London on Friday for conspiring to cause chaos at the UK's busiest airport. The group, said to have been participating as part of a wider international campaign, were found with angle grinders and glue before being arrested on July 24 last year. Eight walked free with custodial or suspended sentences, and one remains on remand for spray-painting Stonehenge last June. Judge Hannah Duncan said the defendants had not breached the perimeter fence and they caused no disruption or "actual harm" but added they had shown "no remorse". Emma Fielding, prosecuting, added: "The Crown's case in relation to those defendants is that they were intending to cut their way through the perimeter fence in the two separate groups, so to make two separate cut points in the fence, and to enter the airport." Days earlier, JSO poster girl Phoebe Plummer, known for dousing Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' in tomato soup, also avoided prison. The 23-year-old was handed a two-year suspended sentence and 150 hours of unpaid work. In a statement read out to the judge before sentencing, she said: "As you may know, I have been to prison three times, and those who know me personally will know I am fairly upbeat and cheerful about the experience. I will always speak the truth, even when there are attempts to silence me. I will try to act with integrity and be accountable for those actions. And most importantly, that I will always act with love. That means whatever sentence you give me today, it will not deter me from resistance. Not when the alternative is to passively accept evil."
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'.
Gulf Today
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
I no longer care about microaggressions: Ash Sarkar
The Independent Ash Sarkar is the face of woke. Up against the Goliaths of the right wing, the 32-year-old journalist from north London counts tech billionaires like Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump among her adversaries — of which she has many. Another to cross her path was Piers Morgan before his unceremonious exit from Good Morning Britain in 2021, when during a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama, she quipped: 'I'm literally a communist, you idiot.' A video of the moment has since clocked up nearly eight million views on YouTube. In 2023, Sarkar was ranked No 45 on the New Statesman's Left Power List, and through appearances on shows like Question Time and in her role as senior editor of Novara Media, she has become one of the left's most ubiquitous commentators. Thus it will come as a surprise to many that Sarkar is now sounding the death knell for the culture wars on which she made her name, declaring: 'Woke is dead.' By that, she means all this uproar about unisex bathrooms and the debate over whether there should be a Black James Bond or a gay James Bond is simply not the priority. Such a statement might seem counterintuitive to everything Sarkar stands for, but 'diversity, equity, and inclusion', she says, is a distraction from the real issues. And so goes Sarkar's argument in her debut book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. 'Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right,' she tells me in The Independent offices. 'I no longer care about microaggressions — pronounce my name however you want.' Sarkar knows that this view is controversial, and as ever, she's prepared for the backlash. 'People are gonna be like, she's moved to the right,' she jokes, drily. She's correct. A quick scan of recent comments on Novara Media, the platform she helped get off the ground over the last decade, reveals a rift in the left-wing ranks over her apparent conversion. 'Pathetic,' writes one person. 'A fundamentalist identity politician slating an ideology she built an entire career around as the Western public massively rejected it.' One headline in The Daily Telegraph reads: 'The Queen of Woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left.' Still, online jibes are nothing compared to the death threats she's received in the past. 'I'm not worried about anyone from the left killing me,' she laughs. 'They've all got iron deficiencies anyway.' Sarkar is self-assured when it comes to politics, offering analysis with the certainty of scientific fact. And for someone who is about as famous as a journalist can get, she doesn't find talking about herself all that interesting. Unlike other media personas who make a meal of just about any X post — ahem, Piers Morgan — she shrugs off any insults, attacks, and controversies, often with a smirk or a funny remark. Sometimes a literal shrug. She has not once thought about quitting her job ('I made my bed') and tells me she doesn't feel any sense of pressure despite her still-rising profile. Sarkar doesn't get upset or angry about the vitriol she faces and credits a lack of media training for her ability to speak with wit and candour compared to the fusty politicians she often shares mics with. A testament to that candour, she calls such MPs 'degraded, atrophied figures'. Sarkar attributes her penchant for insults to her time at an all-girls school. 'It was an Olympic sport,' she says of the name-calling. 'And everyone else was much better (at it than me).' Perhaps most surprising of all, Sarkar doesn't enjoy fighting. 'I hate conflict in my personal life,' she says. 'I'm a scared little dog. If my husband is like, 'Look, let's have this difficult conversation, tell me what you really think.' I cannot do it. Whereas, if you put me in a news studio and say, 'Talk to this pro-privatisation lobbyist, they're going to take your head off and you've got to stop him from doing that,' I'm like, 'Great. Fine, light work.'' She's since come to the realisation that compartmentalising like this isn't exactly healthy. The death of her stepfather last year heralded the end of what Sarkar calls her 'avoidance and 'inshallah' strategy'. At the age of 31, she entered therapy for the first time where she learnt that being unmoved and removed is a survival technique. 'But you can't just freeze things out,' she says. 'Being frozen is not the same thing as being resilient.' Sarkar has been trying to tap more into her emotions. 'You have to accept that your brain is the dumbest part of you,' she says. 'You have to drop down into this intuition and work out what it is that it's telling you.' So far, it's a technique that has served her well, guiding her through some of the biggest decisions in her life, like getting married in 2023. For Vogue, she wrote a piece on how marriage and Marxism can, in fact, co-exist. Outside of TV and radio, you can find Sarkar hungover on the sofa with her husband (also an activist) and their cat Mousa Dembélé (named after the PSG footballer) watching Sharpe, the Nineties series about the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. She falls asleep to woodworking videos. Her social media algorithm is wholesome, made up of 'cats, comedy, and recipes'. She's also an Aries. All this to say, she does, in fact, lead a very normal life.
The Independent
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Ash Sarkar: ‘I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however you want'
Ash Sarkar is the face of woke. Up against the Goliaths of the right wing, the 32-year-old journalist from north London counts tech billionaires like Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump among her adversaries – of which she has many. Another to cross her path was Piers Morgan before his unceremonious exit from Good Morning Britain in 2021, when during a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama, she quipped: 'I'm literally a communist, you idiot.' A video of the moment has since clocked up nearly eight million views on YouTube. In 2023, Sarkar was ranked No 45 on the New Statesman 's Left Power List, and through appearances on shows like Question Time and in her role as senior editor of Novara Media, she has become one of the left's most ubiquitous commentators. Thus it will come as a surprise to many that Sarkar is now sounding the death knell for the culture wars on which she made her name, declaring: 'Woke is dead.' By that, she means all this uproar about unisex bathrooms and the debate over whether there should be a Black James Bond or a gay James Bond is simply not the priority. Such a statement might seem counterintuitive to everything Sarkar stands for, but 'diversity, equity, and inclusion', she says, is a distraction from the real issues. And so goes Sarkar's argument in her debut book Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. 'Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right,' she tells me in The Independent offices. 'I no longer care about microaggressions – pronounce my name however the f*** you want.' Sarkar knows that this view is controversial, and as ever, she's prepared for the backlash. 'People are gonna be like, she's moved to the right,' she jokes, drily. She's correct. A quick scan of recent comments on Novara Media, the platform she helped get off the ground over the last decade, reveals a rift in the left-wing ranks over her apparent conversion. 'Pathetic,' writes one person. 'A fundamentalist identity politician slating an ideology she built an entire career around as the Western public massively rejected it.' One headline in The Daily Telegraph reads: 'The Queen of Woke just exposed the hypocrisy of the virtue-signalling Left.' Still, online jibes are nothing compared to the death threats she's received in the past. 'I'm not worried about anyone from the left killing me,' she laughs. 'They've all got iron deficiencies anyway.' Sarkar is self-assured when it comes to politics, offering analysis with the certainty of scientific fact. And for someone who is about as famous as a journalist can get, she doesn't find talking about herself all that interesting. Unlike other media personas who make a meal of just about any X post – ahem, Piers Morgan – she shrugs off any insults, attacks, and controversies, often with a smirk or a funny remark. Sometimes a literal shrug. She has not once thought about quitting her job ('I made my bed') and tells me she doesn't feel any sense of pressure despite her still-rising profile. Sarkar doesn't get upset or angry about the vitriol she faces and credits a lack of media training for her ability to speak with wit and candour compared to the fusty politicians she often shares mics with. A testament to that candour, she calls such MPs 'degraded, atrophied figures'. Sarkar attributes her penchant for insults to her time at an all-girls school. 'It was an Olympic sport,' she says of the name-calling. 'And everyone else was much better [at it than me].' Perhaps most surprising of all, Sarkar doesn't enjoy fighting. 'I hate conflict in my personal life,' she says. 'I'm a scared little dog. If my husband is like, 'Look, let's have this difficult conversation, tell me what you really think.' I cannot do it. Whereas, if you put me in a news studio and say, 'Talk to this pro-privatisation lobbyist, they're going to take your head off and you've got to stop him from doing that,' I'm like, 'Great. Fine, light work.'' She's since come to the realisation that compartmentalising like this isn't exactly healthy. The death of her stepfather last year heralded the end of what Sarkar calls her 'avoidance and 'inshallah' strategy'. At the age of 31, she entered therapy for the first time where she learnt that being unmoved and removed is a survival technique. 'But you can't just freeze things out,' she says. 'Being frozen is not the same thing as being resilient.' Sarkar has been trying to tap more into her emotions. 'You have to accept that your brain is the dumbest part of you,' she says. 'You have to drop down into this intuition and work out what it is that it's telling you.' So far, it's a technique that has served her well, guiding her through some of the biggest decisions in her life, like getting married in 2023. For Vogue, she wrote a piece on how marriage and Marxism can, in fact, co-exist. Outside of TV and radio, you can find Sarkar hungover on the sofa with her husband (also an activist) and their cat Mousa Dembélé (named after the PSG footballer) watching Sharpe, the Nineties series about the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. She falls asleep to woodworking videos. Her social media algorithm is wholesome, made up of 'cats, comedy, and recipes'. She's also an Aries. All this to say, she does, in fact, lead a very normal life. As Sarkar gets up to help me fix the faulty light in our meeting room for a third time, she reminds me of so many other Muslim women I know – charming, politically engaged, hospitable, and more cutting than Regina George when it comes to terrible politicians. In many ways, her entry into politics was inevitable. Her great-great-aunt Pritilata Waddedar was a fighter in the armed struggles against the British Empire in the 1930s; her mother, a single parent, was an anti-racist activist, trade unionist and child protection social worker, who helped mobilise marches following the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali in east London. Sarkar was 12 when she first read The Communist Manifesto. There is no doubt that her financial background also had an impact. 'I remember what it was like when my mum was worried about money,' she says. 'I remember how arbitrary and unfair it seemed that someone who worked really hard and had two kids was still stressing about having a place to live sometimes.' Her stepdad entered the scene when she was 11, meaning the family could afford to relocate to the more upmarket neighbourhood of Palmers Green. 'It was like the Jeffersons moving on up to the east side. I was like, 'These kids go skiing, what the f**k?'' she recalls. 'It was a different planet, where there was all this ease everywhere. People were worried about different things. I thought, 'Oh, so this is money. This is what money does.'' All her new friends lived in 'houses full of books' and would participate in extracurriculars like singing, theatre, and sports. 'Were they any more deserving than the kids I grew up around?' she says now, her accent a mix of posh clipped and more colloquial. Class is the predominant issue for Sarkar, above and beyond the overblown spats of identity politics. 'Everyone could use the right language when they talk to me and it still wouldn't change the fact that you have racialised wealth gaps, discrimination in the employment market, racialised incarceration rates and sentencing,' she says. The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it's currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed What Sarkar is pushing for is a more complex perspective on politics, beyond the soundbites that made her famous. 'It's about looking at things through a materialist lens,' she says. It's about what things cost, who owns what, and where the real power resides – as opposed to feelings. Her formidable online presence (Sarkar boasts over half a million followers across her social media) has no doubt been built on feelings – often the prickly ones that arise as a result of the irreverent boxing-style punditry that's now a mainstay of contemporary media. A punchy jab here, a viral refrain there, Sarkar has it down to an art. So withering are her put-downs that she once put them on T-shirts to raise funds for Novara. If Sarkar is a heavyweight in verbal sparring, then Piers Morgan is the world champion – for better or worse. Speaking to Sarkar for her book, the Talk TV star confessed that his show has a 'confected' nature. Of course, Sarkar says, Morgan couldn't fess up to the whole shtick being fake. 'He was as honest as he could be, because he's got an interest in people consuming this kind of media. So, if he was to say 'This is all bulls***, everything I do is designed to generate outrage', he would be taking food out of his own mouth,' she says. 'But the fact that he was able to accept that there was some 'confected' outrage, that was an important admission for me.' It's part of the reason why she's learning to be more selective when it comes to media appearances. 'The left had to take every single opportunity that came its way, and I was scared of being perceived as difficult or unavailable,' she says. 'But I want this project of contesting media terrain for the left to exist even if me and Owen Jones [perhaps the only left-wing commentator more recognisable than Sarkar] die in the same tragic bus crash.' As we speak, it becomes clear that something else has shifted within her since she was a spunky twentysomething doing vox pops on the streets of London. 'In hindsight, I was self-deluding and hubristic,' she writes in her book, discussing the personal toll that Jeremy Corbyn's defeat in the 2019 election took on her. 'I got swept up in the fantasy of what a socialist government could be like. There were far more people in the country who weren't like me than those who were.' Her U-turn on identity politics comes from this meteoric, unforeseen rise of the right. 'They're actually organising,' she says with a sense of urgency. 'The problem is the left is weaker than the right, so it's currently getting its head kicked in with the very same tactics that it itself developed.' While the left has 'absorbed' liberal priorities such as workplace cultures and tokenist representation, in effect tearing identity politics from its Marxist roots, 'the right has taken the position of challenger to the status quo. That is the biggest immediate political threat to the left'. Sarkar refuses to give any answers or solutions in her book or anywhere else for that matter, inspired by the ambiguity of Amia Srinivasan's 2021 collection of essays The Right to Sex: 'She opens up a contradiction, and then she opens up another one and another one, and people ask, 'When are you gonna give me the answer?' And she's like, 'I'm not, life is complicated.'' 'I never feel like an authority on anything,' Sarkar says. 'I think doubt is so powerful, doubting your own assumptions, putting them under pressure, putting them under scrutiny.' Her goal is radical: to get people across the political divide to unite against a common adversary – minorities, yes, but not the ones splashed across red-top front pages. The minorities Sarkar is talking about are the minorities who own everything and control it all. 'Why are we actively seeking out reasons to throw each other away?' she asks in her book. For someone portrayed as divisive, it's a remarkably earnest call for changing the world.
