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The News Agents

Ash Sarkar: Is identity politics rotting the left?

The News Agents

Global

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

4.15.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Right now, culture wars seem to punctuate every moment of our daily lives. Politicising more and more and dividing people over issues both big and small. How have culture wars embedded themselves in so deeply in our politics? What if they are part of a wider design to keep the rich powerful? And how damaging have identity politics been for the left?

Ash Sarkar sat down with Lewis to discuss these questions, which are at the heart of her new book 'Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War'.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

0:08.1

This is a global player original podcast.

0:11.9

Meow. I learned something new today, everybody. It's perfectly acceptable to identify as a cat.

0:19.2

Right. Now, let's have another very British conversation,

0:22.6

which is how much we hate woke ideology.

0:25.0

If I now identify as a black man, am I a black man?

0:29.0

It doesn't make you a conservative religious nut-nut,

0:31.8

so not want to wear a rainbow armband.

0:33.8

Yet again, we're having a kind of a woke statue.

0:37.0

Kirstarvort to apologize for taking the knee.

0:39.8

It was a shameful thing to do. Is anybody else sick and tired of extreme woke virtue signaling

0:44.7

adverse these days? Happy holidays or happy Christmas? Oh happy Christmas. Absolutely happy Christmas.

0:50.0

Whoa, hang a minute. Christmas, you'll offend people saying that.

1:02.4

That is the sound of the culture war. A culture war which seems to punctuate every week, every day, every news cycle.

1:15.5

Fought in a million, million hours of broadcast, podcast, newsprint, time and space and tweets and posts. Some fight, some often confected battle between some group or other about something a company or organisation or government has done

1:20.7

or has said and the inevitable outrage machine which follows. It's easy news to make, its cheap content to create,

1:29.8

its shrill voices raise the tone each day that bit higher. Some of the stories are important.

1:37.3

Many are very much not. But what if it's all part of a wider design? That's the view of the person we're going to be talking to at length in this episode in our Friday book series today, Ash Sarker.

1:51.7

She's one of the sharpest voices on the left, and I mean left.

1:55.9

She's an out and proud Marxist.

1:58.4

She came to prominence you might remember as one of the media outriders for

2:02.2

the Corbyn Project in the last decade, the young, cool millennials who for a while captured the

...

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