Ash Sarkar | |
|---|---|
 Sarkar in 2021 | |
| Born | Ashna Sarkar 1992 (age 31–32) London, England |
| Alma mater | University College London (BA, MA) |
| Occupations |
|
| Political party | Labour (2019–2021) |
| Relatives | Pritilata Waddedar (great–great–aunt) |
Ashna Sarkar (born 1992) is a British journalist and libertarian communist political activist. She is a senior editor at Novara Media and teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Sarkar is a contributor to The Guardian and The Independent .
Ashna Sarkar was born in London in 1992. [1] [2] [3] Her great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist who participated in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal. [4] Her grandmother is a hospital carer. [5] Her mother is a social worker [5] who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s, [4] [6] helping to organise marches following the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali. [6]
She attended Enfield County School, an all-girls comprehensive school, before moving to the Latymer School, a selective grammar school for sixth form education. [5] She has both an undergraduate and a master's degree in English literature from University College London. [7]
Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media [8] and teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. [9] In 2017, she taught global politics at Anglia Ruskin University as an associate lecturer. [5]
She is a contributor to The Guardian [8] and The Independent . [5] She has been a panelist on BBC Question Time and Any Questions? , [10] [11] [12] and is a frequent panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze . [13]
Sarkar appeared in the 2019 BBC documentary series Rise of the Nazis to "illuminate the context and perspective of Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933, who died in a concentration camp in 1944". [14]
In July 2021, Bloomsbury said it would publish Sarkar's debut book, Minority Rule. [15]
In 2023, Sarkar was ranked forty-fifth on the New Statesman 's Left Power List, described by the magazine as "one of the left’s most ubiquitous commentators". [16]
In her writings and commentary, Sarkar has expressed anti-imperialist, [4] feminist, [17] anti-fascist, [6] and libertarian communist [7] views. She has taken part in anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Trump protests [18] and in 2018 joined a hunger strike to protest against the detention of asylum seekers at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre. [19] She supported the Stansted 15's actions against deportation flights. [20]
After a clip of her telling Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain that she was "literally a communist!" went viral, Sarkar clarified her views as libertarian communist, a "long termist" who supports the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity policies. [7] [21] [22] Sarkar has described her view on communism as being "about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun. It's not about driving everybody down to the same level of abjection, but making aesthetic pleasures and luxuries available to all." [7]
After joining the Labour Party during the UK general election campaign in late 2019, Sarkar became closely associated in the media commentary on Corbyn's democratic socialist project. [11] [23] [24] Sarkar announced that she had left the Labour Party in September 2021. [25]
In September 2018, Sarkar defended anti-Zionist activist Ewa Jasiewicz, who, together with Yonatan Shapira, had painted "Free Gaza and Palestine, liberate all ghettos" onto a wall of the Warsaw Ghetto. Jasiewicz was scheduled to speak at a Momentum conference that was running alongside the official Labour conference. Sarkar wrote on Twitter that Jasiewicz and Shapira's words were anti-racist, not anti-semitic. In 2019, Sarkar said that, on reflection, she should have "drawn a line between defending Ewa, criticising the coverage and being more critical of the action itself which I don't think was well thought out". [26] [27]
In a 2018 interview with Teen Vogue , Sarkar described herself as being a "fierce critic" of the prison industrial complex, military industrial complex, the expanded use of drone warfare and the expansion of deportation under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She said the loss of jobs due to automation could give rise to fascism as a way of controlling the "surplus disposable population". Alternatively, the extra time created by automation could liberate people to "imagine different ways of living" and "pursu[ing] your passions". [28]
On 16 March 2021, Sunday Telegraph columnist Julie Burchill was ordered to pay 'substantial damages' to Sarkar after writing posts alleging that Sarkar sympathised with fundamentalist Islam and that she "worship[ped] a paedophile" in the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Burchill also wrote a sexual poem about Sarkar, 'liked' Facebook posts saying that Sarkar should kill herself and suggested that she was a victim of female genital mutilation. [29] [30] Sarkar wrote in The Guardian that the abuse had affected her mental health and that she had been prescribed anti-anxiety drugs for the first time in her life. [31] Sarkar said she had no part in the decision by the publishers Little, Brown to cancel Burchill's book contract. She also wrote: "The media's reporting of the issue ignored the defamation, racism and harassment in favour of framing me as part of the woke mob—and Burchill as its victim." [31] An apology published by Burchill included, "I should not have sent these tweets, some of which included racist and misogynist comments regarding Ms Sarkar's appearance and her sex life" and acknowledged that it was her publisher, not Sarkar, who was responsible for the cancellation of her book deal. [32]
Sarkar lives in North London. [33] She is Muslim [7] [34] and she has said: "I pray, I meditate – it's loosey-goosey, pick'n'mix spirituality probably, if I'm being honest with myself; but for me the name I can give to it is 'Islam'." [1]
Diane Julie Abbott is a British Labour Party politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She served in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016 to 2020 and is an advisor to the Privy Council. She was the first black woman elected to parliament and is the longest-serving black MP.
Julie Burchill is an English writer. Beginning as a staff writer at the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has since contributed to newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Her writing, which was described by John Arlidge in The Observer in 2002 as "outrageously outspoken" and "usually offensive," has been the subject of legal action. Burchill is also a novelist, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush was adapted for television.
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983. An independent, Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party from 1965 until his expulsion in 2024, and is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus. He served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. Corbyn identifies ideologically as a socialist on the political left.
Margaret Eve Hodge, Baroness Hodge of Barking,, is a British politician and life peer, who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Barking from 1994 to 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was previously Leader of Islington London Borough Council from 1982 to 1992. She has held a number of ministerial roles and served as chair of the Public Accounts Committee from 2010 to 2015.
Dawn Petula Butler is a British Labour Party politician who is Member of Parliament (MP) for Brent East. She previously served as MP for Brent Central (2015–2024) and Brent South (2005–2010).
Mary Helen Creagh is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Coventry East since 2024, having previously served as MP for Wakefield from 2005 to 2019. A member of the Labour Party, she has served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature since July 2024.
Maxine Peake is an English actress and narrator. She is known for her roles as Twinkle in dinnerladies, a sitcom on BBC One (1998–2000), as Veronica Ball in Shameless, the comedy drama from Channel 4 (2004–2007), Martha Costello in the BBC One legal drama Silk (2011–2014), and Grace Middleton in the BBC One drama series The Village (2013–2014). In 2017, she starred in the Black Mirror episode "Metalhead". She has also played the title role in Hamlet, as well as the notorious serial killer Myra Hindley in See No Evil: The Moors Murders, the critically acclaimed 2006 dramatisation by ITV of the Moors murders.
Claudia Naomi Webbe is a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester East from 2019 to 2024. Elected to Parliament as a Labour MP in 2019, she sat as an Independent from 2021 until she lost her seat at the 2024 General Election.
Rushanara Ali is a British politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) since 2010 and as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Homelessness and Rough Sleeping since July 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she was the first British Bangladeshi elected to Parliament.
Rachel Annabelle Riley is an English television presenter. She co-presents the Channel 4 daytime puzzle show Countdown and its comedy spin-off 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. She is a mathematics graduate.
The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), known as Poale Zion (Great Britain) from 1903 to 2004, is one of the oldest socialist societies affiliated to the UK Labour Party. It is a member of the progressive coalition of Avodah/Meretz/Arzenu/Ameinu within the World Zionist Organization. Its sister parties are the Israeli Labor Party (Havodah) and Meretz.
Luciana Clare Berger is a former British politician who served as Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree from 2010 to 2019. A member of the Labour and Co-operative parties, she was a founding member of The Independent Group, later Change UK, before joining the Liberal Democrats. Berger rejoined Labour in 2023.
Lisa Eva Nandy is a British Labour Party politician serving as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport since 2024. She has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wigan since 2010. Nandy previously served as Shadow Foreign Secretary, Shadow Levelling Up Secretary, Shadow Energy Secretary and Shadow International Development Minister.
Kezia Alexandra Ross Dugdale is a Scottish former politician who served as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2015 to 2017. A former member of the Scottish Labour Party and Co-operative Party, she was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Lothian region from 2011 to 2019.
Joanna Meriel Stevens is a Welsh politician serving as Secretary of State for Wales since 2024. A member of the Labour Party, she has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 2015, representing Cardiff East since 2024, having previously represented Cardiff Central.
This article summarises the views and voting record of Jeremy Corbyn, who was the Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom from 12 September 2015 until 4 April 2020. An independent, Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party from 1965 until his expulsion in 2024.
There have been instances of antisemitism within the Labour Party of the United Kingdom (UK) since its establishment. One such example is canards about "Jewish finance" during the Boer War. In the 2000s, controversies arose over comments made by Labour politicians regarding an alleged "Jewish lobby", a comparison by London Labour politician Ken Livingstone of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, and a 2005 Labour attack on Jewish Conservative Party politician Michael Howard.
Jacqueline Walker is a British political activist and writer. She has been a teacher and anti-racism trainer. She is the author of a family memoir, Pilgrim State, and the co-writer and performer of a one-woman show, The Lynching. She held the roles of Vice-Chair of South Thanet Constituency Labour Party and Vice-Chair of Momentum before being suspended and ultimately expelled from the party for misconduct.
Novara Media is an independent, non-profit, left-wing media organisation based in the United Kingdom.
Patriotic Alternative (PA) is a British far-right, fascist, neo-Nazi and white nationalist hate group which states that it has active branches nationwide. The Times described it in 2023 as "Britain's largest far-right white supremacist movement". Its stance has been variously described as Islamophobic, fascist and racist.
| International | |
|---|---|
| Other | |
