“Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much” said Wilde; but still, Novara star Ash Sarkar’s latest publicity drive is a test of mettle, even for a strategically magnanimous softie like me.
Ash Mark I — the cheeky scrapper phase — first came to national prominence in 2018, jousting impressively with a blowhard Piers Morgan in full cry on GMTV, and blindsiding him with her frank approval of communism. She always seemed clever in outings for Novara but apparently could not resist easy pickings — and many were available at the time. This version of her, circa 2016-2022, was big on pompously telling white people to stop getting upset at the idea that they “benefit from their whiteness”, or that their “presence automatically means the presence of racism”. She liked calling middle-aged Brexiteers “gammon”, announced that Sajid Javid “100% cooks with boil-in-the-bag rice”, and enjoyed scoffing to anyone anxious about open-all-areas passes to nurse’s changing rooms and women’s prison cells that YOU HAVE A GENDER-NEUTRAL TOILET IN YOUR HOUSE!
At least back then she was entertaining. Now, though, Ash Mark II has a serious book to punt, in which she argues that identity politics is a divisive cul de sac making anti-capitalist revolution further away than ever. Hear her out: the political culture of this country has been harmed by self-interested Leftist pundits using social media to commodify whatever currently fashionable identity characteristics nature gave them, spawning rancour instead of fostering solidarity among the working class.
To illustrate this, Minority Rule kicks off with an anecdote from 2023 which Sarkar repeated while doing the podcast rounds this week. She was in Liverpool for The World Transformed (TWT) a self-styled festival of radical politics, art, and culture, which started life as an offshoot to the Labour Party conference. The leader of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, was a speaker. In Sarkar’s words on The Newsagents: “When he was asked what has gone wrong for the Left in the last few years, he looks around the room and he goes … ‘The problem is, that you’re all a bunch of fucking cunts.’” (In the book, she says she was “not exactly thrilled” about his insult; on the pod, she said she thought it was funny.) There followed general uproar in the room as people lined up to say how they had been kicked in the identity by Hallam’s “white anger”. In the book, she describes a dawning realisation: “We have nurtured a culture that’s deeply individualistic, where to be seen as a victim, to be able to claim a marginalised identity position, gives you social capital.” On the podcast, she went further: the silence of onlookers in the face of unhinged activist emoting was “prone to enabling some bad behaviours”.
As it happens, I too have a TWT anecdote. Mine is from the event accompanying the party conference in Brighton in 2019. Sarkar was a speaker, as was Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Ed Miliband. Meanwhile I was due to attend an unofficial Labour fringe event in the city, organised by as committed and conscientious a set of members of the old socialist Left as you could possibly get. Female speakers had some politely expressed worries about the practicalities of saying men could be women now, with a particular focus on disproportionately negative effects for the impoverished and socially dispossessed. Speeches at the event had titles like “I am not your enemy — let’s talk”. Attendees were a visual smorgasbord of socioeconomic and ethnic groups in just the way you’d think Sarkar and co. would normally like.
But someone on stage at The World Transformed had told the activist audience that this fringe event was transphobic, and they should go do their thing. By the time I arrived, protesters were blocking the door, bellowing “SCUM, SCUM” and “TERF, TERF” through loudhailers, throwing water at participants, and generally manhandling them. Attendees were crying, having panic attacks, and a woman in a wheelchair couldn’t get through the throng. The event itself was barely audible over the sound of well-heeled boots kicking the windows. I suppose these are the sort of “bad behaviours” Ash Mark II probably means, though I don’t remember Ash Mark I condemning them at the time.
Do I sound bitter? It’s possible. I realised early on in this book that I’d have to resort to day-drinking to get through it. In abstract, the main thesis isn’t so daft, though braver people have been making versions of it for years. The young Corbynite Left — including Sarkar, obviously — swam with the identitarian wave surging across the Atlantic, not against. They made individualistic grievance politics and competitive victimhood fashionable in a quest for attention, while pretending to themselves it was selfless. Billionaires, centrist politicians, and Oxbridge academics realised they, too, could cheaply rebrand as moral heroes via a few superficial gestures involving rainbows and black squares without changing anything fundamental. In working-class and lower middle-class public minds, various factions from Corbynite to Blairite started to morph into one hypocritical, pontificating, reality-averse blob. The Right began to weaponise public anger about the Left’s antics by pointing out the harmful policy consequences and daft pronouncements, repeatedly, for clicks. And we now have a pointless standoff — everyone screaming about the superstructure and nobody paying attention to the base.
This would be fine and even moderately refreshing if Sarkar weren’t still intermittently using exactly the same old tactics of divide and rule in her new book, even as she argues they should be given up as unhelpful. I’m sure she thinks she is sticking it to the likes of me very satisfyingly when she says that public outrage over trans policies is because “Piers Morgan and gender critical feminists are hostile to trans people”, or where she compares us to Rudolf Hess for a view none of us actually hold (namely, “biology is destiny”). All she actually does is further enrage thousands of working-class women fed up with being taken for thick, expendable mugs by gobby people with English literature degrees from UCL. Or she will do, when that bit is extracted for Piers Morgan’s next viral takedown.
Equally, her main objection now to treating claims about “lived experience” and felt vulnerability as sacrosanct is not that it involves a transparently self-interested power grab, whoever is demanding it — it does — but that it allows the pro-Israel lobby, in particular, to complain about antisemitism and so distract from the hideous carnage in Gaza. She wants us to believe that the politics of feeling obscures “what is actually happening” in the Middle East — also true, in every direction — but equally expects us not to notice when she brushes over the savagery of the October 7 attacks with studied neutrality in a single line: “Dubbed Operation Al-Aqusa Flood, the attacks killed some 1,200 people, and involved roughly 240 individuals being taken hostage.”
She’s good on seeing the opportunistic framings of the Right in narratives about the working classes — from chavs to our brave patriotic boys, depending on the context — but cannot help caricaturing working-class enemies herself. Empty value-signalling is bad when she spots it, but when Lee Anderson criticises footballers for taking the knee it can only be a tell he’s racist. Keira Bell may think she is campaigning against doctors giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children — in an environment made unbelievably hostile by the likes of Sarkar — but actually she’s just a pawn played by sinister forces to get rid of the notion of Gillick competence and so undermine abortion laws. No fair inquiry into the merits of any opponent’s case is ever offered.
Ultimately, then, for all the window dressing about rebuilding trust and confronting hard truths, there is a persistent sense that a core part of the Sarkar agenda is as it ever was — catching waves at the right moment, while dismissing enemy concerns as either oligarch-funded battleships or trifling flotsam and jetsam, depending on what works at the time. A sad side-effect of the blatant manipulation from someone who is sparky and funny in person is that her few attempts at jokes fall flat. It’s impossible to laugh when you feel this irritated.
Even sadder, I’m not sure which wave she is actually catching. Her more hardcore tankie pals will surely now denounce her as a splitter; a new generation of politically minded radicals are off doing their own thing; and readers with any sympathy for the views she caricatures will surely be turned off. Vaguely Left-leaning Millennials might buy Minority Rule in the name of bookshelf aesthetics, but that can’t feel very satisfying given the radical promise with which she started out.
Meanwhile the most radical position of all continues to elude her. Sarkar just doesn’t seem to get that the Left is never going to win the enthusiastic votes of millions who feel alienated and dispossessed by hyper-liberalism — including by its favourite kind of performative politics — until its representatives start to take all of their priorities seriously. This includes the inconvenient ones about negative effects of immigration and forced proximity to dangerous men in changing rooms. They don’t have to agree, but they do have to stop laughing and pointing. For as long as those talking in the name of the Left continue to belittle working-class “moral panics” — a phrase used 11 times in the book, while “grooming gangs” apparently does not feature — the Right will continue to stoke them. In the end, it turns out I can’t forgive Sarkar, no matter how much it would annoy her. I hope she enjoys the rare win.
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SubscribeIt’s apparent that for Sarkar, the problem with identity politics is that the wrong people are engaged in it.
Yes, she’s a blatant anti-white racist whose motives are as transparent as cling film—she’s worried that the evil white majority might develop racial consciousness and start playing the victim card. That’s the real reason she’s suddenly “concerned” about the excesses of identity politics. If she were certain that victim supremacy would remain in her hands forever, she wouldn’t care in the slightest.
Agreed. She wants to shut down the push back coming from ordinary people. Especially if they employ the same techniques she herself has used without shame. It’s all about consolidating the ‘gains’ the wokerati have made in the last 10 years and riding out the common sense criticism, in anticipation of the next big push from the left identitarians.
Embittered failed academic continues her descent into the far right swamp. I’m sure you folks love it. Nobody else is listening, least of all Miss Sarkar I’m confident in saying!
Did you get the even the slightest flicker of self-awareness from reading that? I suspect not.
Oh dear, seems sad that you’ve missed the obvious point – nobody is listening to Sarkar, or Owen Jones, or Dianne Abbott or Corbyn. The public have had plenty of time listening to the offer, and they ain’t buyin’ what you’re sellin’.
You’re wrong that no one else is listening – these culture war distractions are unnecessarily fracturing and effectively impoverishing working people in this country, who should be way more unified in their economic interests against a handful of super rich who don’t need to work and are competing with us for our resources, our media and our politicians. Having a go at people on here – while sometimes tempting – is not good enough. You have to show them where the vast majority of us could stand to benefit from proper redistribution that would reward hard work and disincentivise rent seeking. Let’s start getting that message out!
Unlike the author I have no issues or guilt about not forgiving Sarkar – l just find her too tedious to care about
Yet here you are…
As are you, like Sarker self awareness is clearly missing.
Ever consider that people read articles such as these because Kathleen Stock writes them, rather than the particular subject matter?
Being like Ms Sarkar a performative socialist yourself, probably not…
I avoid Stock’s articles for exactly the reason you say – they are there only for a captive group of Stock-worshippers. Of course, this is true for 90% of UnHerd presentations.
But every week or so I get a bulletin from Novara Media and most articles are written by Sarkar. I always read them because they are so bad that they are funny-bad. Here we have a woman (no a person – yawn – or maybe today it should be sentient being) who picks up on every wave of intellectually popular feeling and writes an article sympathising with it. Whatever it is. It is so funny. I live in a strongly working-class area and I have shown some of Sarkar’s articles around and the result is always laughter. Here you have someone with a degree who thinks she is cleverer than everybody else because of the degree.
So I read this article because of Sarkar, not because of Stock but from now on, I may read more Stock articles.
Btw, Sarkar’s boss Mr Bastani also writes for UnHerd. He is a different prospect because he is much brighter than Sarkar and about 15 years older. So he knows how to write for a particular target audience.
Speak for yourself – some of us just come here for the comments!
I have found these far more entertaining, thought provoking and informative than the articles (though some of the Unheard pieces are v good too), and definitely more so than any of the university courses that Ash and her ilk have attended.
It must be comforting to know that there’s another daddy’s yacht communist who is even more childish than you.
Indeed. I’m surprised at KS paying this much attention to her. Sarkar deserves barely a footnote in the telling of our times.
She’s a tweeny leftist drone, who just happened to ride a particular wave at a particular time.
There’s nothing much to her, except an over-confident political sectarian bigotry.
More baseless dismissal of someone who supported a candidate on a very popular policy platform from which the majority of the country stood to gain. Bravo
If we could see into the future and easily define how the ‘majority of the country stands to gain’ then democratic politics would be unnecessary
Says Des.
‘She always seemed clever in outings’
This is very generous, I don’t think Sarkar has ever seemed particularly intelligent. Bright in the kind of 4 As in her A Levels and can get through a Masters (which now I’ve just googled her is quite amusing as she ‘literally’ has a masters degree in Eng Lit), but not an intellectual.
She just seems to be a textbook example of that typical pose and attitude of the far left in Britain; mistaking academic baubles and grades for intelligence, absorbing the righthink of those institutions (even the whole communist shtick just comes off as a university campus branding exercise), more concerned with espousing that righthink than persuading people to her cause, professing love and care for an unknown and vague society blob whilst simultaneously being pretty much a horrible bully to every real person she ever encounters.
I did listen to some recent interviews she’s done as part of her book promotion (I presume, as a committed comrade, the majority of proceeds are going to causes that support the good work), seems sad that he’s missed the bigger picture that society at large don’t want her side’s ideas. They had their chance in the Corbyn years and it crashed and burned spectacularly.
You expressed my thoughts far more eloquently than I managed
She is sharp but the Left in general has lost intellectual oomph over the last 10 years meaning that her post-colonial identity politics are easily defeated by the likes of Matthew Goodwin.
Goodwin couldn’t defeat a bag of potatos. He’s wretched intellectually.
And yet even by your estimation a superior match to Ash Sarkar.
There’s no better evidence of grade inflation and the corruption of the education system than the fact that Ash Sarkar has a master’s degree. This is a woman who thinks exclusively in tired clichés.
Exactly my thought. I remember when master’s degrees were extremely rare. But now, when first degrees are almost meaningless, taking a master’s is a way of differentiating yourself (on paper).
Today, in the Humanities at least, it seems as if A levels are the equivalent of the old O levels, an undergraduate degree the equivalent of the old A levels and a masters the equivalent of the old undergraduate degree. A lowering of standards since the 1990s for DEI reasons.
What are you basing that on? Have you actually compared the papers and their mark schemes? The other day my grandmother, who was one of the few women to study at Cambridge in the 1960s, was helping my sister with her A-level history coursework and said the requirements were far more demanding than anything she’d ever had to do at A-level. Based on your preoccupation with DEI there’s a fair chance you are or have been a Tory voter – you must have heard or even praised Gove’s rigourous educational reforms. Or do you think he did a bad job?
Fair question.
It is based on discussions with older teachers; comparing required reading of books and texts; no ‘coursework’ considered back then timed exams only; comparing essay requirements at university then and now.
This is an interesting paper by Richard Gombrich (son of Ernst) about this subject, it’s a long read but worth it,
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/mem/papers/LHCE/uk-higher-education.html
I thought Michael Gove’s attempted educational reforms sounded good, but they were almost completely blocked by the teacher’s unions and did not happen.
For me, “preoccupation” (with DEI) is not the right word, ‘concern’ (about the negative repercussions of it) would be more appropriate.
I cannot comment about your grandmother except to say how lucky you are to have her there, that’s a blessing.
It’s ‘rigorous’, not “rigourous”.
A fair response!
I am not sure that standards for required reading in schools have dropped, but I am willing to believe it, going on my own experience of a general avoidance of the classics say in English when I was at school. In fact, it seems intuitive that standards in the humanities more widely would drop as we move to a more visual culture where people read less.
At the same time, when people complain of standards dropping I always wonder to which golden age they think we should be returning to. Not the late 19th century slum schools at the dawn of mass education, surely. And probably not the rote learning that took place in say history lessons before the 1970s Schools History Project began to model classroom history on academic history, encouraging pupils to engage in real historical debates by interrogating primary sources etc. And yet even the 1970s had – I am going on anecdotal evidence from my family again – huge problems with the lack of regulation and accountability before inspections were enforced (my mother said one of her teachers was half drunk for many of her lessons, which would be unthinkable now). What do you think?
That paper was very interesting – thanks for sharing! Before I read it I was already going through the counter arguments to DEI being the key culprit behind lowering standards in higher education – poorer job security for academics, the sidelining of the humanities in favour of STEM, overwork, the free pursuit of truth replaced by the value for money metric (in other words, the marketisation of education) – but lo and behold the paper made all those arguments for me and said very little on DEI besides a small section arguing that it is not the place of universities to correct social injustice through affirmative action, which I agree with! As Gombrich says, class inequalities need to be addressed far earlier. And so back to Labour’s 2019 policies I shared in another comment on this page – raise wages, fund public services properly (yes the NHS needs more money, just as all the better healthcare systems in the world receive far more than ours), build decent council houses etc. All these things will do more for poorer children (4 million children now live in poverty in the UK) than affirmative action, which is the capital-friendly way of ‘solving’ the problem.
As to the success of Gove’s policies, on a brief internet hunt for success stories it does seem a more mixed picture than I realised. But he has the legacy of the free schools, which the Guardian admits here were generally a success at secondary level:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/feb/09/michael-gove-free-schools-at-10-successful-policy-since-the-war-or-mistake
As to DEI, of course I called it a ‘preoccupation’ to sound dismissive. And that’s because I think it is a distraction. I am not sure how it is a problem in secondary education, but in higher education I can’t see how removing DEI policies alone will raise standards. Unless you can give an example? It certainly would be an inadequate response to the problem for Gombrich.
And yes, blessed with a grandmother. I have two grandmothers in fact. One believes that all will be well in this land again if only we reduce immigration and make speech free by getting rid of the ‘blob’ and the ‘woke mind virus’ (even if this means clamping down on rights to protest, to industrial action and all in a climate where most of our information is mediated by the super rich). The other wants a country where people are paid properly, have access to good services, are incentivised to do productive, meaningful work in a world where we have more time for one another, politicians and media are not captured by big money and where we set an example to the rest of the world by upholding international law. I love them both.
Thank you for the spelling correction. I suppose all that remains is for me to congratulate you on your premature use of an apostrophe in ‘teacher’s unions.’ Or perhaps it was written as such to mock them for the way you think they would write it. No offence taken either way!
That’s a lovely response, much appreciated.
I don’t think we can ever go back to the way things were in the past, and nor should we, but I would like us to go forward in a way that makes better use of what was good and worked in the past.
Slums were not nice, but many of the slum schools were excellent, there’s quite a bit about them on the Spitalfields Life website. Literacy was at 96% at the end of the 19th century so they must have been doing something right.
Learning by rote is good, the majority of children have the ability to learn in this way relatively easily. Once you have the background knowledge at your fingertips, your times tables, historic dates, kings and queens etc, that gives you useful context for future studies.
Children need to learn facts first and foremost, preferably in a way that captures their imaginations. They are most definitely not ready to make value judgements on primary sources from an academic standpoint, they do not have the neurological development necessary, or the life experience, and they are extremely unlikely to be bothered to read around a subject enough to understand nuance.
This is one of the main problems with young people who have been taught in this way, it seems to have made them intolerant and radical without any real understanding of the past.
DEI. Discriminatory, racist, sexist and divisive. It needs a lot of people to enforce it. It has to be authoritarian because it is so inimicable to human flourishing.
Well, America is on to it, I just hope eventually we will follow and return to merit, instead of skin colour, religion, ‘gender’ (s e x) and bed partner preferences. None of these things should matter in employment or education. All that matters is whether a person has the skills, intelligence and character.
Better to spend the money wasted on DEI on improving primary and secondary education to improve the chances of all children.
Sorry, I have’nt got the energy for Corbyn and Marx, but putting aside all the rosy socialist ideas there is a dark side, it’s all out there to be read about. Antisemitism probably the worst of all.
It’s been good to talk to you, best wishes.
Thanks again for another thoughtful response. I am not averse to the idea of more rote learning – indeed, the term ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’ was in vogue when I did my PGCE at Cambridge a few years ago. There was also strong emphasis on storytelling to try and make the facts stick by capturing imaginations, as you say. But there was also – I think – high engagement from pupils when given points of view to challenge, trying to solve the puzzle presented by enquiry questions (EQs) such ‘What was the Enlightenment?’ ‘Did the Roman Empire really ‘fall?’’ or What kind of reform was the Reformation?’ But though I think this suited some (a minority are intellectually ready for university years before they are socially) it could well be that most need time to mature before they can use their critical faculties without heavy scaffolding. I’m not dogmatic on this – I know Katharine Birbalsingh does very good work here and would like to know her opinion on EQs
As to hoping for a return to merit, I – like your Gombrich paper – think that economic inequality does far more to make a mockery of meritocracy than DEI. Your belief that the money saved from cutting DEI budgets in this area would be enough to address this is part of a wide delusion that more than merits the name ‘preoccupation.’ The highest number that GB News could come up with the other week for DEI spending in higher education was £28m. Now that’s a big-sounding number that can raise outrage among those who don’t put numbers in proportion. How much money would axing those DEI jobs save for educating Britain? Between 2023 and 2024 the UK govt spent £116bn on education so the money saved would be a 4,143ird of the total education budget i.e. an almost meaningless number. And yet £600m+ Paul Marshall’s Unherd, GB News and Spectator, not to mention the outlets of Rothermere and Murdoch, love to have us railing at each other over what are in economic terms, nearly non-issues. Again, I think Gombrich would agree.
As to Corbyn’s ‘rosy socialism,’ it can all be read about in the relative prosperity and happiness of western Europe (from where so many of his ‘communist’ policies were inspired) and the dark antisemitism you can read all about it in the Forde Report – the most accurate assessment of the issue which conveniently no one has heard of.
All the best and wishing you a good rest of your March. Sources below:
https://www.gbnews.com/news/dei-british-universities-staff-double-investment-diversity-equality-and-inclusion
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/annual-report-education-spending-england-2024-25#:~:text=In%202023%E2%80%9324%2C%20total%20public,terms%20as%20in%202006%E2%80%9307.
You’ve missed the grade inflation statistics from 1997 onwards then?
All enabled by dumbing down of courses.
When I chatted with an headmaster friend of mine about the huge proliferation of exam boards a few years ago he related his discussions with numerous of these organisations who essentially were offering better grades and outcomes for his pupils and school better that he should supersede targets and expectations of his LEA and parents.
No improvement in actual pupil performance was required.
Yes, but I agree on grade inflation! This is not just DEI (in fact I wonder how much inflation is at all to do with it). With academics I have spoken to it is back to this marketisation point – students now spend so much on higher education that there is tremendous pressure on examiners to give students an acceptable grade. I can give my own experience (sorry am v reliant on anecdote here) of doing my undergrad at Oxford a few years ago where it was virtually unheard of for anyone to be given less than a 2.1 if they just put pen to paper. Fast forward to my masters in the Netherlands, where the low cost of the tuition meant academics were comfortable with regularly failing students without reservation if they thought they weren’t making the grade (knowing it wouldn’t ruin them financially and that they could always enrol on the course again).
Excellent prose. Matches Kathleen’s! Very well put!
I can never think of Ms Sarkar without remembering the lines of the greatly talented, alas now late, Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, who appeared to have known her when she was still serving her apprenticeship to egotism:
… Power ranger, pedalling. A small big bang. A cosmic blur. She’s halfway up Ermine Street. The burn of all future is on her and she ring rings the bell, drops one paw from the handlebar, salutes and sings the national anthem of herself
(“Ashna Sarkar, Aged 5” by Roddy Lumsden)
‘seems sad that he’s missed the bigger picture that society at large don’t want her side’s ideas.’ Look at this list of Corbyn’s 2019 policies. Which ones are unpopular with the public?
1) Increase health budget by 4.3% (good one for the over 55s, who are almost 40% of Unherd’s readership)
2) Raise minimum wage from £8.21 to £10
3) Stop state pension age rises (that’s right Unherd readers)
4) Create a national care service for the elderly
5) Nationalise key industries (if you disagree with this tell me how the (wholesale) privatisation of water, energy, mail, rail or (piecemeal) privatisation of health has been successful)
6) Build 100,000 council homes a year
Answer: they all had majority approval in the polls. But the super rich owned media (like Unherd, owned by £600m+ hedge fund owner Paul Marshall) was more interested in talking about the fact Corbyn’s glasses were wonky or claiming that wanting policies that are normal for our (more prosperous) western European neighbours made you a communist.
What we have is incompetently regulated state controlled private companies. Telecom privatisation has been moderately successful. Energy renationalisation does not seem to be proceeding well.
Even the capitalist USA seems to better at providing local utilities.
Yes telecoms seems to be the one example people can (half-heartedly) give as a success. But yes, better regulated private companies sounds good. Are you sure any of these private companies in the sectors we’re discussing can really be described as state-controlled? Which ones? Isn’t it it more that they have too much control of the state (recall the huge state payouts national rail bosses enjoyed during the strikes)?
I have met many on the Left with whom I have had good relationships. Thoughtful and decent people who often raised questions which my free market ideas didn’t address well.
The problem is well expressed by the cliche that the Right thinks the Left silly and niave and the Left thinks the Right is evil. People like Sahkar demonstrate this clearly and this, often vicious, antipathy allows committed Leftists to do and say anything about their opponents.
As I said there are plenty on the Left who decent people and believe in democracy but there are too many are, at heart, Stalinists. In the Times they are a Changing, Dylan, “please get out of the new road if you can’t lend your hand.” I have always found this line chilling. It’s easy for someone to drift along these lines.
And, no, I don’t think that the Austrian corporal was of the Right even though too many who shamefully valued his ideas were themselves on the Right.
> “the cliche that the Right thinks the Left silly and niave and the Left thinks the Right is evil.”
As someone who doesn’t fit either side, I don’t think the cliché holds up to scrutiny. There are also plenty of people on the Right who think the Left is evil, and there are plenty of people on the left who think the Right is silly and naïve.
I would certainly agree that many on the Right think Stalinist and Maoist are evil but I don’t think that many believe that of the typical voter.
“Never kissed a Tory” is an attitude commonly found in Leftist circles.
My experience is that those on the Left believe they are right while those on the Right are wrong.
“Now, though, Ash Mark II has a serious book to punt, ….” It’s about money. How very Marxist!
“The only way to true, lasting, inner happiness is Transcendental Money”
Where are those forces fighting to end Gillick Competence? I want to join them.
GC has always been illogical and from that poor start has inevitably been corrupted to actual Evil.
For an uneducated rural like me. What is Gilleck Competence.
“Biology is destiny” is your position, whether you agree with the precise wording or not. Just because those words haven’t come out of your (or any other TERF’s) mouth doesn’t make it a straw man argument. That biology defines you for the rest of your life is not some radical statement, it is fact.
If you’re going to say biology is destiny you’d better be clear about what you mean by destiny. If you mean that being a female, for example, means you are destined to have babies, that is self-evidently incorrect. Factually.
If you mean that being born with a white skin makes you automatically a racist, or that having a black skin automatically makes you destined to suffer from racism, that is also proven false in the real world.
So what does it mean?
In fact, being a female does mean approximately 85% (ONS) of us will have a baby or babies, and that’s just here in the UK in a hyper liberal democracy with easy to come by abortion.
Your second example, the marxist fabricated ‘racism’ theory, is indeed false, but that has nothing to do with biology, that is a chosen viewpoint which can be disgarded at any time.
85% (and shrinking) seems like a good example of choice to me, not destiny.
Biology puts limits on our opportunities and choices. What we make of that is up to each person. If we put artificial limits on what a person can do based on the categories they belong to, that’s not due to biology.
In fact 80 – 85% has been fairly steady over the past 70 years. It dropped a bit after WWI because so few men came back from the front but it rose after WWII, the baby boom generation.
Throughout history approximately 20% of women did not have children due either to being barren or, yes, choice, either theirs to remain spinsters, or that of men not wanting to marry them. Evolutionary biology, natural selection ?
The UK birthrate is dropping at present, but we’ll have to wait and see to understand why I think.
Going from memory 80% of women who have ever lived have descendants today, but only 40% of men.
btw upticked you because someone had downticked you for no reason I could make sense of.
I feel quite glad not to have been familiar with Sarkar until this week when I watched a bit of an interview with Aaron Bastani. Switched it off after 10 minutes; I’m not interested in her previous activities and I’m not interested in the grovelling repositioning.
Just glad this hideous era of corporate victimhood and fragility looks to be over.
TWT? Surely there is an ‘A’ and ‘S’ missing from that title?
She is one of the best arguments for recolonisation of former imperial territories.
We could keep such talents in the lands of their forefathers to help develop them to untold heights
– the perfect Millennial and now without her youthful looks, striking as they were.
Please no! I am glad that at least one Marxist scumbag has left our shores!
I entirely dislike this crowd btw as personified by this horrid Sarkar person.
The best way to deal with them is to stop giving them any attention; and treating them as the malevolent specks they are.
Apparently her great-great-aunt was a Bengali nationalist who participated in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal.
She is presumably proud of her ancestor. So you would expect her to have some sympathy for the British nationalists campaigning to remove invaders from our shores.
Did we by any chance ‘execute’ her ancestor, do you happen to know?
Her aunt Pritilata consumed pottasium cyanide before you lot got to her.
How very slovenly of us! For which I rather belatedly apologise.
” You” were in cahoots with the Islamists then, and probably had forgotten good manners under ” their” benign influence!
Yes I totally agree, all that ‘martial prowess’ tosh when ‘they’ were forever mutinying!
I presume the ‘excuse’ was “divide and rule” but even I am not really old enough to recall all that, I must admit.
Her aunt would probably be stirring in her grave. They had idealism and ( however misguided) a certain nationalist feeling, as you point out.
Good dissection.
Miss Sarkar’s past entertainment value surely only rested on ” I am literally a communist “, sweetly naive perhaps if you’re a teenager, but not if you’re in your mid twenties as this young woman was at the time she said it, just a bit foolish.
She’s an ambitious chancer I think, nominally marxist, and being a young and pretty female is given a platform by the media. She’ll probably do well, for a while at least.
Given that the body count and repressions committed by Communism in the twentieth century matched or exceeded those of Fascism and Nazism, it should be equally unacceptable to claim to be one.
I agree.
I thought for a moment we were going to get something about AS’s body count. I’m deeply disappointed.
Someone should explain to her that having very long fingernails is traditionally a ruling class affectation signifying that someone else does the manual work. Although on reflection that is ‘literally communism’ as actually practised, I suppose.
The Left has nothing to offer except moral oprobium. Identity politics doesn’t fare well on the doorstep. Nor did outrage by the likes of Ash. The Left, in the absence of policy and intellectual substance, stands for nothing.They can zigzag from Blairism to Corbynism to Starmerite grimness. Whatever. The public has switched off.
I think the left are probably just noisy cints?
The Left has nothing to offer than outrage and opprobium. Outside the performative antics, there is a void. No platform, no compelling case. The public has noticed.
The blurb on Amazon says:
“Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.”
In other words: Everything is fine. The left is perfect. Stop noticing. Shut up.
That’s the book in a nutshell. The left is pure, the right is evil, and if you think mass Third World migration/invasion, identity politics (anti-white hate), trans extremism, or censorship are problems, you’ve been duped by the “rich.” Pay no attention to the institutions enforcing far-left “woke” dogma—because it’s not happening… but also, it’s good that it is.
Pretty much spot on!!
Entertaining dissection but perhaps it misses one point. One feature of the Woke / progressives is that most are conformists who have never thought hard about their creed. If the fashionable orthodoxy changes then so do their opinions. Sarkar may be an example.
After an initial assault by brave feminists – including Kathleen – growing disaffection amongst young males and electoral defeat, the tide has turned and progressives are currently shifting ground en bloc with amusing speed. It is even possible that they will start listening to others and contemplating reality rather than just repeating slogans and deflecting counter arguments with ad hominem attacks like a sect of religious nutters. Maybe in a few years the lunatic Left will have retreated back to the few academic departments they emerged from and once again can be safely ignored. Perhaps.
That’s a very good point that no-one else seems to have noticed. I’m not sure Sarkar herself will ever connect with reality as you suggest but we’ll see.
This brings up a question I often ask myself when I see people so thoroughly entrenched in their own dogma – to what extent do they ACTUALLY believe it, and to what extent are they just in the process of convincing themselves just because they think they ought to?
In which Ash Sarkar distinguishes her personal brand of identitarianism and leftwing condescension from supposedly worse versions so that she might be excused her own abject folly. Silly, noise-making person. Set phasers to Ignore.
She is a deeply unserious person who draws on all the advantages belonging to an “oppressed minority” brings in the political entertainment industry in which she is successful.
Sardar is a media-savvy identity politics grifter who offers nothing to the world except the kind of student politics which people used to grow out of but the new economy of activism now rewards.
A Leftist writer recounting her times going to Leftist conferences and meeting Leftists and then reading two books of one such Leftist and not particularly liking it but will still bore us writing about it.
Is that a good summary of this article?
(I gave up half way through so perhaps it improved at the end).
I could add… in a Leftist leaning Unherd.
Where are the writers from the Right? I can’t think of a single one.
Who is this woman?
Should I have heard of her even in the wilds of Stow-on-the-Wold? Where ‘White Privilege Reigns Supreme’.
Most people in the country – at least 80% according to research – do not resonate with any of the dogma brandished by the woke left. In the long wake of Brexit, Trump x2 and the massive political realignment taking place across Europe, this reality is at last beginning to dawn in progressive circles. Ash Sarkar’s book is an attempt to circumvent this encroaching elephant entering the room. I have not read the book but judging from what I have seen of her views expressed in debates I think her strategy is now going to be to imply that the fault lies not so much in identity politics per se, but in that it is mainly white people who are doing it.
Considering her politics remain in the sixth form she’s done very well to get two degrees.
After reading paragraph four, I was delighted to discover that Roger Hallam and I have something in common. Turns out Ash Sarkar’s cohort has found a way to unite humanity after all.
As for Sarkar herself, forget it. This apparent volte-face about identity politics means nothing, as usual. Has she had second thoughts about her bigoted, elitist, divisive and spectacularly wrong-headed ideological standpoint? Doubt it. After much soul-searching, she’s finally admitted to herself that she needs to find another way of convincing her opponents that they are wrong about everything and she has been absolutely right all along.
Condolences to Ms Stock if she was forced to read Sarkar’s sanctimonious screech-fest all the way to the end.
Good as always from Kathleen Stock, but contradictory at the end. I understand she does not want to forgive but that shows she doesn’t entirely reject the cancel culture Ash Sakar now disowns and that Kathleen herself was attacked by.
Oh thing was wrong factually. Tankies have in recent years been anti-IDPol and RadLib cancel culture. It’s the liberal swamp around Trotskyist groups like the SWP that jumped on IDPol as away to recuit naive middle class liberal students.
To paraphrase the great Sid Waddell: “There’s only one word for this: magic writing!”
When is Professor Stock going to publish a collection of her essays from UnHerd and The Times? She is such a witty and fluent writer, someone who knows exactly how to construct sentences and indeed entire arguments that start with a promise and deliver delight. A book by Stock could easily sit next to collections by Didion, Orwell and others. I’d like to see the faces in my local left-wing bookshop when I ask for it.
It delights me to order the likes of Stock, Douglas Murray etc. from my local leftie book shop.
Kathleen Stock Is probably UnHerd’s best author. Each of her articles has a satisfying blend of wit and insight.
I agree. The strongest regular contributor at present, due to the combination you mention. However, for wit I’d nominate Kat Rosenfield and for insight Paul Kingsnorth—where have they gone?
By coincidence, I finished reading ‘Minority Rule’ just before reading this review. I agree with Kathleen Stock. Indeed, the chapter in the book on ‘trans’ and women’s rights is even more laughable than one could imagine…
Are you a masochist?
I suspect it’s not just working class women who are “fed up with being taken for thick, expendable mugs by gobby people with English literature degrees from UCL”.
Why not just ignore her? Giving her attention of any kind just rewards her. She is tedious.
Sarkar = sophomoric
Nobody is more colonised and subservient to White culture than a Muslim believer in Marx.
I will always have a soft spot for Sarkar. She admitted some ago that she had “never knowingly kissed a Conservative.” That is an act of human kindness which deserves our eternal gratitude.
Is there anyone more annoying than Ash Sarkar?!
You know, it’s possible she sits at No.1 for me (it’s close between her and Alistair Campbell).
Smug to the point that she makes me feel nauseous. How anyone can get to be 30+ and not develop some degree of self awareness is baffling. Quite why Aaron Bastani works with her is equally baffling.
Diane Abbott? Liz Truss?
Her ideological soulmate Owen Jones?
Ah you nailed it! How did I forget Owen Jones!!
Another left wing middle class person who plays with fire and does not realise it’ burns. A pity there is no Tardis type machine which could transport her to a camp in the Kolyma in winter during the 1930s for say a month and then bring her back. She could experience the joys of communism.
She has benefited greatly from her claims of racism, anti-colonialism,etc. Another hypocrite who does not deserve the time of day. Why do people write about her or read what she writes? This only makes her worse.
To paraphrase Robert Webb: read some fuckin Solzhenitsyn, that OR, to quote Elon Musk: go f**k yourself.
My key takeaways from this elegant takedown are: ‘kicked in the identity’ and ‘I’d have to resort to day drinking to get through this’.
It sounds like both AS and KS are unwilling to give up their pet obsessions and bury the hatchet – even if they both think there are more important issues. The usual position is: this isn’t worth squabbling over – you need to drop it!
Fair enough, but she’s just an attention-seeking mediocrity, and its all been done before with more elan than she can muster.
““Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much” said Wilde”
I suppose Ms Stock does not know her Bible particularly well, but perhaps next time ’round she may want to try out a much older line, which carries the same essential truth…
“If your enemy is thirsy, give him water, and in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
When Wilde says it, it has the frisson of his persona – gay, catty, almost insincere. What does it feel like when Jesus says it?
gay, catty, almost insincere?
The left unites in hate. It is their shelter from thought: hate of /the Tories: hate of Trump, Johnson, P Patel, S Braverman and K Badenoch. This is how they make friends, reassure themselves they are in the right company and sniff out the “enemy”. I was once of the left but their total betrayal of women and girls disgusted me.
Non white privilege. Arrogant and boring.
Just a gobby, arrogant lefty dark skinned women loved by the left but with no obvious intelligence or insight to justify the publicity she gets and the fawning attention given to her.
And her ‘I’m a communist you idiot’ response to Piers Morgan shows that she thinks in empty slogans. She should do a podcast with Rory Steward – two people too unintelligent to realise how stupid they sound.
What an entertaining essay! Let me list a few of my favourite phrases: ‘strategically magnanimous sofite like me’; ‘kicked in the identity’; ‘felt vulnerability’.
Kathleen Stock’s brand of brave pushback is no longer rare—even someone called Ash Sarkar is following suit, if to a more timid degree. But Stock’s nerve was uncommon around the ‘turn of the decade’, when she was run out of Sussex U. And I’d guess that she’s always had an outspoken flair that’s quite her own.
Sensible people across the sociopolitical spectrum—a clear majority when disaster hasn’t just struck and tempers don’t run too hot—can find common cause against woke extremes and anti-woke extremes (yes, those exist too). Bring as many people into your broad tent as you can. Don’t think the worst of too many of your neighbours and fellow citizens here in the jolly olde Anglosphere.
Yeah, I need to do a better job of practicing what I preach, however fun and energising weekend sermons can be. What preacher, be he never so abstemious or whiskey-bent, doesn’t? -AJ (stone sober in the early California morn).
Is there a working class moral panic? No. The working class is far too savvy to get worked up by whatever red herring is being whipped up into a lather by the likes of UnHerd/Spectator writers and readers. Long may it continue to remain so.
She will “literally” self-implode as the task of remaining relevant to her middle class Marxist audience will inevitably fail, as the race for identitarian victimhood will throw up new attention-seeking missiles to replace her.
And they will not be best pleased that she has exposed the danger of their game now that she has reaped the benefits of it.
What the hell is a “libertarian communist”? I googled Sarkar and that’s what the AI spit back.
That doesn’t even make sense.
They are such people as “left-libertarians” though. Look up Jane Coaston.
I have trouble with the intelligibility of left-libertarianism, because of the coerciveness of the wealth redistribution integral to the leftist project.
Mr. Craven,
Though you once called yourself centre-right, I think you have trouble taking a fair or balanced view of anything you perceive as being at all left of centre. The “leftist” or “rightist” projects don’t include most that are anywhere in the centre, not when it comes to all their coercive overreach.
I’m not of their number, but I think hard-left libertarians are often more anarchy adjacent, where the hard-right type want a more traditional society and a market-ruled free-for-all with little or no taxation. Less hardcore libertarian lefties want some, more-graduated taxation and basic services secured by a smaller government.
Personally, I’d take some of the tradition and some of the increased taxation of corporations and very wealthy people, perhaps with an elected Board of Sensible Husbandry (BOSH) to follow upon the crude, unelected chainsaw-wielders of DOGE, including their broligarch-in-chief.
All that said, I find it quite incoherent too, even compared with the typical incoherence of any single ruling ideology.
How is taxation of the unearned wealth of the super rich, say the Grosvenors who have owned an amount of land now worth at least 9bn (since the Norman Conquest – nothing coercive about that…) coercive? It’s what every country that has ever been able to provide an affluent working class has had to do.
Forgiveness for someone like Sakar is overrated. Strip her of her citizenship and deport the hate filled, hateful, and hostile foreigner.
“All she actually does is further enrage thousands of working-class women fed up with being taken for thick, expendable mugs by gobby people with English literature degrees from UCL.”
As myself a gobby person with an English Literature degree from UCL, I would just like to state for the record that I share the rage of working class women against the likes of Ash Sarkar.
Upvoted.
In this excerpt from Bk1 of my heroic couplet satire The Wokeiad, Ash Sarkar lights the farts of Owen Jones:-
Just then is heard a weedling petty voice
Familiar to the ear, though not by choice.
“What’s missing’s thrill, the headiness of risk.
Instead the scowling blue-hairs go ‘tsk tsk’. 520
Let’s shake things up. Let’s push the envelope.
Unleash the Twitter horde to tweet their tropes.”
So said, unbuttoning his sagging drawers,
J____ “takes the knee”, then crouches on all fours.
Ash Sarkar, literally communist,
Grasping a lighter in her girlish fist
Awaits the shouted signal: “Gas girl, quick!”
Guts rumble. “Thar she blows!” The lighter’s flicked.
Now from J____’ fissure comes a mighty roar
As of a cataract or rutting boar. 530
Greek fire or North Sea gas, no one can tell
Prostrated as they are by the foul smell.
No wind of Satan, nor his foetid breath,
No cellar where an old rat met his death,
Bears a comparison to such disgrace.
All full of puking is that sorry place.
Nor are the ears from punishment exempt:
The bum trombone, lit at the first attempt,
A Handel’s Fireworks in cacophone,
Volume intensified and lowered tone; 540
While J____ on all fours starts a porcine squeal
Piercing enough to make the blood congeal.
Now doth Aeolus inside J____’s ours
Brew up a further helping of the farce.
How very Anglo-Saxon of young J____
To steal Jove’s thunder from his awful throne.
New gas expelled, and by nymph Ash enflamed,
Apollo contemplates art’s final shame,
While Artemis scornfully blocks her ears,
And Pallas Athene blinks back the tears. 550
Rude and learned at the same time. You spend and lot of time and brainpower in the guts and bowels, which to some extent is by choice. Got anything good to say, or is all farcical sneer? I’m still impressed in a favourable way too, though you once asked, justly enough, why you’d give a [bleep] about anything “someone like me” would say. Penchant for imitation notwithstanding, you seem like a highly original fellow. Just a bit more unsolicited feedback. Cheers.
Though I suspect the views on inequality of people like you (forever lapping up the billionaire press) are part of the reason we’re sliding towards fascism, I cannot deny the literary talent on display here.
Sarkar is just another halfwit, with little to no life prospects, grifting for a living. She’s profiting by stealing oxygen from articles like this one.
No disrespect, Kathleen, but please don’t feed the troll.
Why would you ever want too?
There is the public square – then edge of the square and finally the outskirts of life – where you find Diogenese, GG Allin and St Ninian. These three are entertaining IMO – but what about “ash sarkar” or “kanye west” or “josep stalin” ? or Pol Pot – who at least used his real name. Not entertaining – just criminally insane people who mostly evaded justice. I agree we do not need to “forgive” certain criminals – nor do we need to stand on judicial ceremony when they get their due. Lex talionis is a good idea in peacetime but such characters have declared war on humanity and should be treated as illegal combatents – the justice of battle or even the mob in the street is better than letting these beasts do what they will.