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

She’s been described as divisive by the left and ‘the Queen of woke’ by the right, but does the journalist’s new book really signal a change in her entire belief system?

“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.

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