We must never forget the cruelty of wokeness

Most people first became familiar with Ash Sarkar when she hollered ‘I’m literally a communist, you idiot!’ at Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain in 2018. It went viral. The liberal press christened her the spokesperson for her generation. Teen Vogue gushed. Even now you’ll see flapper-girl socialists in Homerton sporting earrings that say ‘Literally a Communist’. They’re yours for 25 quid. Sarkar communism was less about the working classes sticking it to The Man than the middle classes pissing off daddy.

But for me, there’s a far more telling Sarkar clip from a couple of years earlier. It was July 2016, two weeks after the Brexit vote. Sarkar and her Novara Media chums went on one of their class safaris to Barking in east London. They grilled working-class whites on why they voted to leave the EU. Then Sarkar encounters a working-class kid – just 17 – in a West Ham top. He’s nervous and inarticulate. He fluffs his lines. He says there are too many people coming here and ‘taking our jobs’ but he also says ‘they’re not working’. Sarkar looks right into the camera, at Novara’s audience of well-heeled faux-radicals, and arches an eyebrow. And there it was, the look that would come to define what passes for leftism today: the cocked eyebrow of bourgeois derision.

The left lapped up this spectacle. The woke bros at Joe invited their man-bun readers to ‘feast your eyes’ on this boy making a tit of himself. Feast your eyes. This sad episode captured the truth and the cruelty of identity politics, the way it became a means for well-educated leftists to sneer at ‘whites’ further down the social ladder. Indeed, Novara titled its brave expedition into the dark heart of Barking ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Brexit’. A community denuded of its status and its spark and its history and reduced instead to its racial characteristics: this was the poison of identitarianism.

So you can imagine my surprise when I heard that Ms Sarkar now thinks identity politics is a bit iffy. She’s doing the rounds promoting her new book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. Apparently, she thinks ‘woke is dead’ and the left is ‘destroying itself’ with a politics that’s all about ‘I, me, subjective experience, lived experience’. She says the left was driven potty by identity and ‘at no point has anyone gone, “Get a grip”’. Eh? Yes we did. We all said ‘Get a grip’. And we were called bigots, transphobes and racists for doing so. Ash can write a book if she likes, but she can’t rewrite history.

Seeing Novara Media types pillory identity politics is a bit like seeing Shell bemoan pollution – they’ve been pumping this corrosive dross into the body politic for more than 10 years. They were the vanguard of woke, feeding Britain’s time-rich middle-class youths a steady diet of bollocks about race, structural supremacy and the violence of misgendering. Listen, if you think we’re going to take lectures on the lunacy of identity politics from a media publication that thinks it is a ‘psychologically dominant act’ to refer to a person with a cock as ‘he’, you must be off your rocker.

Novara people are positively obsessed with ‘whiteness’. Alongside bitching about ‘the unbearable whiteness of Brexit’ – way to erase the ethnic-minority people who voted Leave – they’ve held forth on the ‘tautologous’ truth of ‘white privilege’ and the ‘discursive formation of whiteness’. Snappy slogans. That’ll get folk to the barricades. They’ve haughtily offered advice to ‘white people’ on how to be less racist. ‘Don’t be a prick’, was one of Sarkar’s tips. Straight back at ya. ‘Whiteness [is] a composite’, Sarkar once said. It’s not a ‘single process of racialisation against a single, tangible racial other’, but rather is made up of ‘lots of different processes of racialisation’. I’d critique that if I knew what it meant.

Novara writers bewail ‘the structural issue’ of ‘white supremacy’ in the UK. I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks Britain is a white-supremacist nation needs padded walls, not a column in an online magazine. They complain that Britain’s ‘governing elite’ is ‘disproportionately white’. Maybe that’s because 82 per cent of people in England and Wales are white? Just spitballing here. They were cock-a-hoop when that juggernaut of America’s depressing racial politics – Black Lives Matter – barged into Blighty. ‘What white people can do next’, they advised. Not stopping in the street if you see a Novara Media film crew would be my top tip.

Then there’s the gender madness. The Novara lot have been stormtroopers for the post-truth delirium of the trans ideology. They wring their hands over ‘the ciscourse’ on trans issues. I love that they mashed together two words no normal person ever uses (‘cis’ and ‘discourse’), neatly exposing the academic poncery behind their Marxian cosplay. Ash is on record defending the stiff Edwardian etiquette of trans-speak. ‘“Cis” is just a prefix used to describe people who identify with the same gender as their birth’, she once said about the term ‘ciswoman’. No it isn’t. It’s a misogynistic slur that turns women into a subset of their own sex.

Novara supports ‘transitioning’ kids. ‘Transitioning is good for trans teens’, said one headline. When Britain finally came to its senses on the insanity of pumping confused kids, many of whom are gay or autistic, with puberty blockers that have severe consequences for fertility and mental health, Novara went nuts. Denying children these drugs is proof we’re living through a ‘rapidly escalating transphobic moral panic’ and ‘rising fascism’, they said. Yep, letting kids go through puberty is fascism now.

Novara is drunk on ‘queer’ politics. It publishes videos asking, ‘What is homonationalism?’. Like anyone gives a fuck. It discusses ‘violence as the normative state of queer life’. Is it?

On and on it went, Novara’s soulless creed of ‘intersectionality’ slicing like a knife through any possibility of class solidarity or even just common sense. Even now, Sarkar seems most concerned about woke’s impact on her precious left. ‘How the left is DESTROYING ITSELF!’ was how The News Agents titled its interview with her last week. I’m far more worried about the lives woke has destroyed.

Let us speak plainly. Women were raped because of woke, because of the deranged policy of putting men (‘transwomen’) into women’s prisons. Does Sarkar still support that policy? She did once call Julie Bindel an ‘anti-trans bigot’ for opposing the placing of ‘transwomen’ in women’s jails. Young homosexuals were mutilated because of woke. Because of the neo-hysteria that says removing a lesbian’s breasts magically makes her a man. Nothing on Novara suggests it has changed its mind on this most lethal element of the identitarian derangement. And the clout of the working class was further weakened because of woke. It was already in a shitty state after the Eighties and Nineties. But now those of us who said class is more important than race, and that working people of all heritages should club together against the elites that hate them, found ourselves being branded ‘class reductionists’, even racists. That was always the irony of these new Marxians: they posed as radical, but both their neoliberal politics of identity play and their wariness of working-class ‘gammon’ made them sound positively Thatcherite. They even want coalmines closed down, like she did.

These are the true wages of woke. Perhaps it was just a fad to the middle-class left, which might now be discarded. Maybe for the liberal elites it was just a means of accruing virtue. But for others – women, gay kids, working people – it was a poisonous ideology that impacted in the most awful ways on their lives, livelihoods and bodies. If you were a cheerleader for this politics, it’s not good enough just to say ‘Oops’. Sorry, Ash – this mea culpa of sorts is too little and far too late.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy