‘I have a pathological need to be right': Ash Sarkar on culture wars, controversy and Corbyn's lost legacy

The Guardian

07-03-2025

'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 guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply