As humans we have the ability to look at situations and change our minds about them. If for example we have been promoting Cause ‘A’ but new evidence emerges that undermines Cause ‘A’ then it’s right to back away from Cause ‘A’, apologise for being wrong, move on and try to put right the problems that support for Cause ‘A’ had caused.
I’ve done this and walked that path myself. I used to be on the Left but gradually moved to the Centre Right after seeing the damage done to my own working class communities by Leftist politics. My departure from the Left was in stages, first I rejected the ‘revolutionary Left’ on the grounds that revolutions are sometimes the worst ways of bringing about change and can often create more problems than they solve. Then, over time, I rejected many other aspects of Leftism as the problems that Leftism created or exacerbated became more apparent to me. I’ve done and said some silly things when I was on the political Left, some of which I cringe at but others I do not. Some of the positions I held way back then such as believing that the Soviet Union would respond positively to strategic disarmament moves by the West have been utterly shattered and shown categorically to be wrong. Other positions that I took such as regarding individual rights and in particular LGB rights have more or less held up although with some caveats regarding gender ideology.
However what I’ve never done, unlike too many on the Left has been to campaign for stuff that is obviously wrong and which would be seen to have bad outcomes right from the start. The transing of children is something that is clearly bad, because of the potential terrible outcomes for children who have fallen into the hands of the ‘Gender Mengeles’ but was supported vociferously by the UK political Left. I never supported that but too many on the Left did.
One of those leftists who supported some of the worst aspects of Leftism such as identity politics and the gender transitioning of children is Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar. She has apparently had a sort of Damascene conversion about identity politics and the gender identity cult and is now complaining that identity politics and gender cultism has damaged the Left.
Now normally I’m all for welcoming a lefty sinner who has repented or liberal who has been mugged by reality. This is because I’ve been a naive fellow traveller of the Left and I’ve seen many people take the same viewpoint journey as I have when they have found that the ideology of leftist grates against objective reality. There are a lot of former leftist bit players out there who I don’t think should be permanently condemned for their former views. But Ms Sarkar was not a bit player in the leftist culture war that has been waged on our society. As Mr Brendan O’Neill over at Spiked points out Ms Sarkar has been a heavy promoter of some of the worst kinds of identity politics. She has mocked those concerned about demographic replacement of Britons in London, has promoted the lunatic idea of paediatric gender transition, held anti-democratic views with regards to the Brexit referendum and much more. Her company, Novara Media, also has staff that came out of the side of Hamas following the 7/10 Pogrom, something that many of us will neither forget or forgive.
The sort of politics and policies that Ms Sarkar and her associates have promoted have had real world negative consequences. Women have been assaulted and raped both in prison and on the outside by the men posing as women that Ms Sarkar has championed. Children who’ve not even reached Tanner Stage II (approx 11 years old) have had their puberty blocked and their bodies and minds effectively ruined by the trans cult that Ms Sarkar so publicly supported. The agitation by the Left and some non-Left useful idiots for ‘refugees’ and open borders, a cause that Ms Sarkar clearly approved of, has resulted in massive wastes of taxpayer resources along with crime and an increasing sense by the public of not feeling safe because of Ms Sarkar’s imported pets. Real people have been hurt, real people have been cancelled and oppressed and real people have had their lives and the lives of their loved ones negatively impacted by the politics and policies of Ms Sarkar and her mates.
Mr O'Neill said:
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.
Mr O’Neill is correct here. People like Ash Sarkar who have promoted some of the most monstrous ideas which have had in some cases monstrous outcomes are probably going to walk away relatively unscathed by the troubles that they’ve imposed on others. The Middle Class Left has always been able to do this because of their access to resources, contacts and family networks. They play their version of ‘Lady Bountiful’ with society and its resources and institutions and get to leave it all behind when it all goes tits up and they realise that their ideology and ideas are catastrophic failures. It’s others, most often at least in the UK, the working classes who pick up the tab for the bad or naive ideas promoted by the Middle Class Left.
Although I welcome Ms Sarkar’s acceptance that some leftist ideas are so utterly mad as to become a weapon against the Left by their opponents I can’t help asking myself the question: Why didn’t she do this sooner? It was quite evident to even someone with a modicum of intelligence let alone a seemingly intelligent woman like Ms Sarkar that for at least five years or so the bad ideas promoted by the Left such as BLM, the gender cult, the racialising of politics, the identity politics the ‘Palestine’ quasi-religion and much more were having terrible outcomes for individuals and society. Why not speak up then when the problems created by all the things that Ms Sarkar and her associates had promoted were starting to become evident? The cynic will say that Ms Sarkar is only saying what she’s saying because the public is starting to see that the aircraft of the Left is steadily plummeting to the ground. Ms Sarkar was quite happy and enthusiastic about Lefty Airways when the plane was climbing but looks to parachute out now it’s crashing. She could be trying to reposition herself in order to keep her relevance but to be charitable it could also be the start of a genuine acceptance that the sort of leftist that she favoured has failed and failed dismally.
It’s good that she’s recognising some failures but because of her high profile role in promoting back ideas I would want to see much more contrition from her and over a much longer period of time before I could without reservations support her change of heart. In my view Ms Sarkar’s ‘mea culpa’ has arrived far too late for me to immediately accepted as genuine and heartfelt but time I suppose will tell where the truth lies.