Ash Sarkar: 'Marx shows why society is the way it is'

Ash Sarkar is just back home from the Hay Festival, which was a step too far into the hinterland for a self-confessed “city rat”. She laughs: “The longer I go without the sound of a stolen motorbike, the more likely I am to have a nose bleed!”

Chatting on Zoom, the fiercely articulate firebrand of the Left is less intimidating than she is on TV. She’s funny and self-deprecating, switching between smart, sarky political commentator and Tottenham gal and delighted Spurs fan, fresh from seeing her team win the Europa Cup.

Ash Sarkar PIC: Jonathan Ring

A senior editor for left-wing news website Novara Media, she shot to fame in 2018 when – at 26 – she lost her rag with Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, telling him: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.” The clip went viral. Now 33, she’s a regular on TV and radio. The Times has called her “the poster girl for the radical left”.

Her first book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, was published in February and swiftly became a bestseller. Characteristically frank and witty, it’s an analysis of how minority issues – race, gender, disability rights, immigration – are using up the oxygen in the political sphere. The Left, she argues, is running scared of identity politics, while another minority – hedge-fund managers, corporations, oligarchs – are continuing to run the country in a way which benefits principally themselves.

This process is fuelled by the toxic algorithms of social media, the failings of conventional media (as a journalist she is particularly tough on other journalists) and the “liberal individualist paradigm that centres the self above all considerations”.

“I think that while individual freedoms are important and should be protected, the idea of the individual being the most meaningful unit of political philosophy is a load of bunkum,” she says. “As humans, we’ve only got one thing that keeps us alive out in nature: we need each other.”

She quotes the example of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton, who forged a successful Rainbow Coalition with the Young Patriots, a group of poor white men who used the Confederate flag as their emblem. They later gave up the flag out of respect for their compatriots.

“Today, I think we would do it in reverse, we would say ‘Give up the flag before we can work together’. And then the whole thing falls apart before you’ve had the chance to do anything useful. So it’s not about subordinating race, or ignoring the connections between race and class, it’s saying, ‘you’re going to have to form bigger coalitions if you want to win.’”

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London-born Sarkar comes from a line of strong, politically minded Muslim women. Her mother and grandmother were both in the trade union movement and were anti-racism campaigners. Her great-great aunt lost her life in the Chittagong Uprising against the British in 1930s Bengal. “I know other people say never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table, but that was a lot of what we discussed. There were two rules growing up: don’t support Arsenal, and don’t be right-wing, and I abided by both of them.”

She was reading Marx at 13. “I thought that if I read the Communist Manifesto conspicuously boys would like me. It really didn’t work.” At the same time, something was striking a chord. “I think I had an intuitive sense that the way resources are distributed isn’t fair and doesn’t make sense. My mum would be up late worrying about money for things like school shoes and books. The thing that Marx really does for your thinking, even if you don’t turn out to be a Marxist or a communist, is that he shows you why society is the way it is.”

She studied English Literature at University College London, and had no intention of becoming a journalist, but when her friends James Butler and Aaron Bastani founded Novara Media, she made so many suggestions they decided to invite her on board. In the wider media, she was, she admits, the right pundit at the right time: a young, articulate, left-wing Muslim woman, or as she once termed it, “a tap dancing poodle”.

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Having spoken out on race issues, she has come in for some criticism for what appears to be an about-turn in her book. It’s complex, she says. “I remember what it was like 15 years ago on the Left, when there was very little understanding of race. It wasn’t fun. It was sometimes hostile. Then along came this language, and you could make known things that you’d experienced your whole life. It gave you a kind of unassailable authority, especially when you invoked your own lived experience.

“That kind of power is addictive. You subtly shift from trying to articulate a vulnerability to trying to assert your victim status because it has some social capital attached. I’ve done it, I’ve seen others do it, and now I’m a lot older and hopefully a bit wiser, I can see why people are drawn to it, but also that we have to move past it if we’re going to grow and be connected and be effective political operators.”

While she’s absolutely assured when talking politics, she admits to a crisis of confidence while writing the book. “I really needed help and encouragement to write from a place of belief and confidence rather than fear and self-doubt.” Suddenly sounding quite vulnerable, she says: “It’s not controversy that scares me so much as somebody calling me stupid.”

Her bolshieness is part of her armour, which she needs as a woman in the public eye. She’s has 400,000 followers on X, but says she’s found her holiday snaps reposted on porn sites and discovered posts on sites which make her the subject of racist rape fantasies.

“It’s something I find difficult to talk about because I don’t want to sound like I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin. I have a very privileged position, I get paid to have opinions. Effectively, I get paid to be left-wing, which is something that most people through history have done for free. I’ll take the cost. But the human brain is not designed to process that much violence. You become alienated from yourself, it feels like you’re looking at the world through six-inch glass.

“The way I cope is that I am the luckiest person in the world when it comes to my friends, my husband, my community. I love living in Tottenham so much. Seeing other people of colour walk around with their heads held high, it makes me feel strong and joyful and proud.”

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When I ask what inspires her to keep going in these challenging times, she gives me two answers. She talks about London-based Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, part of the team that founded the website We Are Not Numbers, who has lost 21 family members in the Israeli assault on Gaza. “If I was in his shoes, I don’t think I could take another step or draw another breath, let alone be as committed as he is to lifting up the stories which are coming out of Gaza.”

And the other one? “I’m still on cloud nine after Spurs won the Europa League. So if you ask me who inspires me, I’d be like – Micky van de Ven!”

The communist. The idealist. The Spurs fan. The woman who occasionally worries the world will think she’s stupid. I suspect the real Ash Sarkar lies somewhere in the middle.

Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar is published by Bloomsbury. Ash Sarkar is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 15 August at 6:15pm (with Lanre Bakare and Jen Calleja) and in a solo event on 16 August at 12 noon.