Ash Sarkar: ‘You can’t get anything done if you’re looking for symbolic harm everywhere’

Read time: 4 mins

In brief…

• Ash Sarkar says both the right and left-wing have issues with victimhood, and that little can be achieved on either side when people are seeking out “symbolic harm”.
• As a left-wing political commentator, she has been criticised for her analysis of the left and its actions.
• She believes the left-wing is lacking a leadership figure, someone who can bring its ambitions back to the mainstream of politics, as the right-wing dominates across Europe and America.

What’s the story?

Ash Sarkar, a left-wing, female Muslim journalist with a successful career, influence and growing platform, makes the right-wing furious.

A regular guest on high-profile political discussion shows and senior editor at progressive media organisation Novara, few people anger the British, white, male Twitter/X trolls more than Sarkar.

Now, adding a new string to her bow, Sarkar has published her debut novel Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. The book takes aim at the elite who dominate politics and the media, and right-wing culture wars, but also scrutinises the failings of the left wing, and looks at where it can improve and mobilise.

She tells Lewis Goodall that the reason she decided to tackle the issues on the left of politics in the book, was because of how she saw the right taking, and exploiting, from the left-wing playbook.

"They were taking elements of liberal left wing identity politics," Sarkar says.

"The focus on a racial lens, this idea about victimhood, the idea that victimhood gives you status."

This, she says, has become a detracting issue on the left as well.

"There's been a concept creep, because once you start looking for symbolic harm everywhere in your real life, trust me, you're not going to get anything done," she says.

"It becomes an excuse to stop trying to work with other people, stop trying to deal with the messiness of other human beings, and make the failure of the left, the marginalisation of the left into a sort of virtue.

"Everyone in this position of competing over who can be the victim is so corrosive to solidarity, because instead of looking at people as potential allies, you look at them through the lens of, 'what are you going to do to me?'"

This, she adds, stops people whose politics don't align from being able to work together for the greater good.

Her analysis of the left has resulted in pushback from progressives.

"There are lots of people who have got their criticisms of it," she adds.

"Some of it, I think, is legit. Some of it, I think, is unfair.

"But one of the things that's quite striking is that there are a lot of people who said, Thank God you said it, and not me."

Why the right is triggered by Ash Sarkar

"Yes, lads, we're winning."

That was a comment Sarkar made about the reported decline of the white population, and growth of ethnic communities, in the UK. This, she says, was a joke, but one that also "goes viral" frequently, and has been used by far-right accounts on social media in an attempt to legitimise the racist, far-right 'great replacement' conspiracy theory.

"The right needs people that they can hold up as malevolent actors who are out to harm white people in some ways," she says.

"I get held up as this figure who wants to do it."

She says her joke has been taken out of context as "evidence" of mal-intention towards white people.

"It's about trying to make white people feel victimised on the basis of their race in order to further the far-right's agenda," she adds.

"What is that, if not a form of snowflakery?"

How does the left make political gains?

In recent years, right-wing politics has dominated across the world – with Donald Trump back in the White House, Georgia Meloni leading Italy, the rise of the AfD in Germany, and the growth of Reform UK on our own shores.

Sarkar has no time for the likes of Nigel Farage, but she does believe the left can learn from how people such as the frequently-absent Clacton MP have shaken up British politics.

"People like Farage hate parliament and parliamentary procedure, and they're able to cut through a lot of the pomp and circumstance to really connect with people's anger and frustration," she says.

"I think that is something that the left absolutely has got to do. It's no good just saying, here's my solution for you feeling angry.

"People need you to experience their anger with them. That's a basic component of empathy and connection."

She says that the left has no issue with its organisation, it simply needs a figurehead to drive its goals and values into mainstream politics.

"The problem for the left at the moment, when it comes to electoral politics, isn't the absence of organisation," she adds. "It's the absence of leadership."

"It's all about finding the right leader. There's got to be a white dude with a regional accent. It's got to be."

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