Ash Sarkar identifies as ‘a frustrated idealist’. She also identifies as a communist, anti-fascist and feminist activist, and happens to be brown, Muslim and a woman. In other words, she’s a walking, talking embodiment of right-wing rage bait. Still, the political journalist invites ‘friends, enemies and everyone in between’ to join her as she discusses her excellent debut book Minority Rule: Adventures In The Culture War, published in February this year.

Summarising the book, she doesn’t mince her words: ‘most of us are getting screwed over.’ In it, she laments the relentless profit-chasing of mega-corporations. She calls out the cynical hedge-fund managers, politicians and landlords lining their pockets while three million Brits are in problem debt, despite being in full-time work. She describes how the right weaponised the identity politics of the left, then critiques the left for its occasionally self-sabotaging approaches. Without that ability to reflect on strategy weaknesses and be honest about mistakes made by pockets of the social-justice community, she knows how difficult it will be to work towards real solutions.  

In the book’s analysis of trans moral panic and the ‘gender critical’ cause, or newspaper claims (without foundation) that ‘asylum seekers are barbecuing the queen’s swans’, Sarkar outlines how it’s really the culture of distraction and a normalised manipulation of reality that are damaging society. She will be taking part in the aptly named Book Festival event ‘Immigrants Aren’t Eating Your Pets’, hosted by Glasgow-based Yorkshire author Heather Parry. 

The discussion aims to expose the real minorities that are endangering the public good. Spoiler: it’s rarely the ones the right-wing press want you to think it is, and Sarkar’s book lists many eye-rolling examples when the scapegoating has happened to her personally. Described by The Times in 2018 as ‘the poster girl for the radical left’, she is frequently a target for abuse online, but her principled, well-researched and straight-talking style in interviews has gained her a notoriety of which she has grown to be proud (the clip of her calling Piers Morgan an ‘idiot’ on Good Morning Britain went viral and gained herself hordes of new fans in the process). 

Sarkar will also appear in ‘Changing The Culture’, a panel event alongside Guardian arts correspondent Lanre Bakare and literary translator Jen Calleja to discuss the intersections between class, race and culture. These are topics Sarkar discusses regularly, not only in Minority Rule, but in her weekly podcast If I Speak with co-host Moya Lothian-McLean. Sarkar is senior editor at Novara Media, a role that evolved after she met its co-founder Aaron Bastani at a University College London occupation, opposing the hike in tuition fees. It was 2010, Sarkar was 18, and soon after he invited her on to the Novara FM podcast. Fifteen years later, she has come to be regarded as one of Britain’s most prominent left-wing political journalists and a quick-witted commentator to be reckoned with.

Changing The Culture, 15 August, 6.15pm; Immigrants Aren’t Eating Your Pets, 16 August, noon; both events at Edinburgh Futures Institute; main picture: Jonathan Ring.