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Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Ninety Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 2534

 

A Morning Thought @ 2533

Barry Gilheany ✍ At the time of writing this, the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is presiding over a two day Global Migration summit in London attended by more than forty countries.

 He has vocalised “how angry” he is over the scale of  “illegal” immigration and has promised to “roll my sleeves up” to tackle the scourge of the “people smuggling gangs” who allegedly are the main dynamic behind the upsurge in illegal or irregular migration. In language reminiscent of that spoken in GP surgery waiting rooms and other public spaces on the day of the Brexit referendum, Starmer said that the UK had been for too long a “soft touch” for illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration, he opined, “makes me angry because it is unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price – from the costs of hotels, to our public services struggling under the strain.” And he reassures us, “it’s unfair on the illegal migrants themselves because they are vulnerable to being exploited by vile gangs.” [1]

The Prime Minister told the summit that the countries affected by people smuggling should stand together against this ‘vile trade’ rather than be divided by it. He called for measures against people smugglers to be put on the same level as those against terrorist threats. Amongst the measures announced at this summit are extension of right-to-work checks to gig economy workers through amendments to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill; an allocation of £1m to help tackle people smuggling gangs in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and an advertising campaign in Vietnam, another hotspot for this business model. Also £30m will be allocated to tackle global trafficking routes and the flows of illicit money that fund them. A further £3m will go to the Crown Prosecution Service to help it expand its international work.[2]

Perhaps most controversially, from a human rights perspective, is the review announced by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper into the implementation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act which protects the right to a family life and which has been used by migrants to argue for their right to stay in the UK “to make sure that the immigration and asylum system works effectively in the way that Parliament intended it and make sure that there is a proper sense of control in the system”. Described by Keir Starmer in February as a “loophole”, Article 8 has tended to attract the ire of the nativist right and has been at the centre of a number of contentious asylum cases, including one earlier this year when a Palestinian family was allowed to remain in the UK having made their original application through the Ukrainian family scheme.[3]

A particularly unpleasant vista for liberals on asylum and immigration matters was the video message sent to the summit by far right Italian Prime Minister Georgi Meloni in which she endorsed the processing of asylum claims in third countries; something which looked to have been discredited by the last Tory UK government’s Rwanda fiasco but something, in the view of Ms Meloni whose time has come. The UK government will also seek advice from Denmark on tougher implementation of immigration law.[4]

With a total of 5,000 arrivals on UK shores so far in 2025, the fastest the figure has been reached in the last three years; the pressure on the UK government to “do something” is undeniable not least because of the potential electoral threat to both Labour and Conservative parties from Reform UK led by Nigel Farage who has revelled in the toxicity of immigration asylum debates; a toxicity for which he in no small measure has been responsible since even before the Brexit referendum and his notorious “Breaking Point” poster campaign. The invocation of the frustration felt by “working people” (rather than the more sociologically neutral figure “taxpayer”) at the cost of “hotels” and the feeling that Britain is a “soft touch” by the PM indicate an unmistakeable shift into populist territory.

However, Keir Starmer’s reprise of the root cause of people smuggling as the major causative factor in “illegal” immigration is part of a fallacious narrative around another migration myth deconstructed by the foremost migration scholar Heine de Hass: Smuggling is the cause of illegal migration. Apocalyptic narratives of mass exoduses of people fleeing poverty and war through dangerous and inhospitable overland terrain and then onto overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels also portray migrants and refugees as victims of ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘merciless’ criminal gangs and ruthless mafias. Rather than providing them with a safe passage, these ‘evil’ misery merchants force migrants into these lethal routes, often abandoning them on the way.[5]

This public perception of migrants as helpless victims of mercenary smugglers and the accompanying moral missives from politicians about the nefarious activities of these “gangs” chimes with the widespread idea that smugglers’ criminal activities are the root cause of illegal migration and the large-scale arrival of asylum seekers at the border. Or, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) summarised: ‘The system of migrant smuggling … has become nothing more than a mechanism for robbing and murdering some of the poorest people of the world.'  According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smuggling is ‘a global threat to migration governance, national security, and the well-being of migrants,’ while ‘criminal networks who cause such misery.’ In order to ‘break their business model, the Biden Administration in 2022 launched an ‘unprecedented’ operation to disrupt human smuggling networks and prevent Central American ‘migrant caravans’ moving north, boasting of an ‘all-of-government effort to attack the smuggling organisations”.[6]

While the experiences of those seeking refuge and sanctuary from war, economic collapse and oppression in their native lands should never be understated or trivialised, de Haas states bluntly that nearly four decades of anti-smuggling crackdowns or Fortress Europe type border enforcement regimes have signally failed to stop illegal migration while worsening the plight of migrants and refugees. The explanation for such epic failures lies in the idea that smuggling crackdowns will reduce illegal immigration rests on false premises about the causes of illegal migration.[7]

For the basic cause of illegal or irregular migration is the closure of legal, legitimate means of entry to a host country. Since the 1990s, persistent demand for migrant workers in agriculture, construction and services in destination countries has not been matched by legal migration opportunities. Quite the reverse actually as governments have introduced visa requirements for migrant workers who could hitherto enter and leave unhindered and have enforced those requirements by upping border controls. Consequently, the resultant mismatch between labour demand and border policies has led to rising numbers of workers prepared to traverse borders illegally, or to overstay their visas or temporary work permits. For example, boat migration across the English Channel to the UK in the early 2020s as dominated by Albanians, mainly because Albania is the only country in Western and Central Europe whose citizens still need a visa to enter the UK.[8]

The introduction by Spain and Italy in 1991 of visa requirements for North Africans who before then could travel freely ‘gap year’ style to Southern Europe taking in periods of work on farms and construction sites, pleasure and adventure was the opening salvo in the trans Mediterranean boat migration controversies of the next three decades. Under the pre-Schengen era of open frontiers, benefits accrued to Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians in the form of job opportunities and higher salaries abroad while spending the rest of their time with family at home where living was cheaper. With the blocking of free entry into Spain and Italy, North Africans started to cross the Mediterranean illegally in pateras (small fishing boats). But with the quasi-militarisation of the Straits of Gibraltar by Spain by early-warning border control radar systems, the professionalised smuggling of migrants began to spread out across an array of crossing points on the long Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines, a diversification process which continued in the first two decades of the 21st century to encompass aspirant migrant workers from sub-Saharan African countries such as Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Ghana and later refugees fleeing countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Eritrea. These refugees could no longer travel by aeroplane to Europe because of carrier sanctions. From 2014, increased maritime border patrolling in the Mediterranean created yet more reorientation of smuggling routes – towards Turkey, the Balkans and central Europe, reinforced by the large-scale movement of Syrian refugees from Turkey to Greece. Increased border enforcement in the Aegean Sea after 2016 led to the convergence of more smuggling routes in the central Mediterranean – from Libya and Tunisia to Italy and Malta, from Morocco to Spain, and from the West African coast to the Canary Islands.[9]

So, this snapshot of border controls in the Mediterranean demonstrates that massive investments in border enforcement does not stop smuggling but rather initiates endless cat-and-mouse games between border patrollers and smugglers, who will constantly shift routes and strategies to maintain their business. The same story can be told about how the militarisation of border controls on the US-Mexico border has only increased migrants’ dependence on smugglers (‘coyotes’) and so made them more vulnerable to violence, exploitation and abuse – whether by smugglers, police or border guards, or temporary employers for whom many work to pay for the next leg of the journey in Mexico.[10]

Condemnation by political leaders of the business model of “people smuggling gangs” and pledges to smash them not only fail to take account of how visa restrictions by potential host states and the border security industrial complex instituted by European states as well as the EU generate clientele for smugglers but also make two other category errors. The first is the systematic conflation of smuggling with trafficking. Trafficking does not have to involve any migration at all. Trafficking concerns the severe exploitation of vulnerable workers through deceit and coercion. Smuggling is about service delivery, with migrants and refugees voluntarily paying money to smugglers to cross borders safely and avoid being caught by the police, border guards or criminals. This failure to distinguish between smuggling and trafficking was brought into sharp relief by media coverage of the tragedy in October 2019 when 39 aspiring Vietnamese migrant workers were found dead inside a truck trailer in Grays, Essex. The media almost immediately reported that they were ‘trafficked’ to Britain via China and France, whereas in reality this was about smuggling, with migrants and their families paying large sums of money to make the passage to the UK, where they planned to work. [11]

The second error is the oft quoted assertion is that smugglers are part of international organised crime or centralised, hierarchical, mafia-like structures or criminal gangs. However numerous studies from around the world refute thus assertion. Smugglers’ core business is to provide migrants with a safe passage which is why migrants are willing to pay or their services, in order to stay away from criminals, as well as the abusive state agents who collaborate with them. Several studies by Gabriella Sanchez, an anthropologist who has done extensive research on the US-Mexico border, have shown that most smugglers are small operators and are often former migrants themselves. She found that women and children play an important role in smuggling operations, recruiting customers, negotiating fees and payment plans, withdrawing smuggling payments from banks, caring for migrants, and guiding groups of border crossers though the desert.[12]

In the same vein, Julien Brachet, a French geographer who spent years doing fieldwork in towns and oases in the Safara Desert, found that for migrants from sub-Saharan African countries who attempt to cross the Sahara on their way to North Africa via countries like Niger and Libya, the greatest risks they face are abusive or corrupt policemen, border agents and soldiers, who exact informal tolls and bribes and may strip migrants of money and essential assets like mobile phones. Brachet’s research also refutes the stereotypical images of international mafias: smugglers tend to be small-scale operators who have a good knowledge of local routes and circumstances. They are often former nomads, migrants or ex-migrants who sometimes cooperate with corrupt police and border officials. For decades, local traders and truck drivers have played an important role in smuggling migrants across the Sahara Desert often in combination with other businesses such as cross-border trade and the smuggling of goods.[13]

The received wisdom of the people smuggling narratives pushed by governments and media alike also deprive migrants of agency in the journeys they choose to make. For the bottom line is that smugglers provide a service that migrants and refugees are willing to pay for. For most people who engage with smugglers, emigration is not an act of desperation but a deliberate investment in a better future which requires careful planning, regardless of the risks involved. When Senegalese economist Liunguere Mously analysed survey data she collected in Dakar, she found that prospective migrants who planned to undertake the dangerous trip to the Canary Islands across the Atlantic were aware of the risk of dying they were willing to make it. She also found that they had very realistic expectations of the wages they could earn in their favoured destinations of Spain and France. The demonisation of the ‘vile’ people smuggling trade conveniently ignores the humanitarian motives of ordinary citizens and activists who simply give refugees a ride across the border or those who helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied territory in the Second World War or those who helped people escape people escape from the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War or those who help refugees escape contemporary tyrannies such as the smugglers who helped Iranian refugees to flee the mullahs regime across deserts and mountains to Afghanistan.[14]

For what governments refuse to accept is that demand for labour is the main driver of illegal migration and that closing down legal migration channels and the ability to move freely will not deter migrants from making perilous journeys especially if legislators ignore the illegal employment of migrant workers. Governments focus on smugglers as a means of distraction from the interests (and ballooning costs) of the security industry complex in border controls. For it is arms and technology companies who have reaped the real benefits of illegal migration. According to a series of investigations by the Migrants’ Files – a consortium of European journalists – EU countries paid 2.3 billion Euros in taxpayer money to border enforcement between 2000 and 2014, while deportations had a price tag of at least 11.3 billion Euros. 

Note that the current Labour government did not shout from the rooftops about the costs involved in the record deportation numbers of 24,000 in the last eight months they trumpet. A further billion euros was spent on coordination efforts to control European borders, mainly through Frontex, Europe’s border agency. Between 2012 and 2022, the annual budget of Frontex rose almost ninefold, from 85 to 745 million Euros. Four leading European arms manufacturers – Airbus, Thales, Finmeccanica, and BAE – and technology firms like Saab, Indra, Siemens, and Diehl are among the prime beneficiaries of EU spending on military-grade technology supplied by these privately held companies. In total, the EU budget for ‘migration and border management’ for 2021-7 is 22.7 billion Euro, up from 13 billion Euro on 2014-20.[15]

Manufactured moral panics over “small boat invasions” and the “vile” people smuggling trade will never alter two basic truisms about movement of peoples; first that human beings have moved around the globe since the dawn of time; second there are no lengths to which either determined or desperate people will go to better their lives and those of their dependents or to escape adversity, no matter how extreme. The solutions to the problems of illegal migration is to create or restore legal routes and, yes, speed up asylum application processes so that applicants do not have to exist in the limbo environment of hotels to their perpetual boredom and frustration and to the (ill-informed) outrage of the native vox populi. Sadly, it seems that the short-term imperative to ward off electoral threats from Reform UK will dictate UK migration policy rather than long-tern evidence based strategic approaches. A cut and paste version of pan-European approaches with the populist right tail wagging the dog. When will they ever learn?


[1] Keir Starmer calls for global unity against ‘vile trade’ of people smuggling at summit.

[2] Ibid

[3] Kiran Stacey Immigration. Review of human rights for small boat arrivals. The Guardian. 31st March 2025

[4] Keir Starmer calls for global unity against ‘vile trade’ of people smuggling at summit.

[5] Hein de Haas (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking p.291

[6] Ibid, pp.291-92

[7] Ibid, p.293

[8] Ibid, p.295

[9] Ibid, pp.296-98

[10] Ibid, p.299

[11] Ibid, p.302

[12] Ibid, p.303

[13] Ibid, p.304

[14] Ibid, pp.304-06

[15] Ibid, pp.306-08

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Migration Myths 🪶 People Smuggling

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Ninety Six

The Alt Media ✊Written by Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

We have nothing left to lose — let’s f**king act like it!


We were told the resistance had to be different this time…

We can’t swing at every pitch, they said.

We have to choose our battles, they said.

We can’t overreact to everything Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, they said.

Well fuck that and fuck them. We need to resist it all. We need to fight it all. And we need to start right fucking now.

America is under attack from within. Trump and Musk are decimating every level of our government while trying to reinstate segregation and move us to a Soviet-style system of oligarchy, where the rich get richer and everyone else is left to fend for themselves. The chaos they are creating already has a body count, and many more people will die. If this isn’t a time for total resistance, then when the hell is?

The leadership of the Democratic Party reacted to the election by surrendering. They told us how much they would work with Trump to help the country. 

Continue reading @ The Alt Media.

Fight ALL The Fights

A Digest of News ✊ from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 24-February-2025.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Fractured futures of Ukraine IDPs.
⬤ Trump, Putin & Ukraine.
⬤ 11 years of Crimea occupation.
⬤ Ukraine’s anarchists.
⬤ Russian on trial for killing Ukrainian POW.
⬤ allegations of Russian torture.
⬤ deliberate destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Seventh year of life-threatening torture in Russian-occupied Donbas for supporting Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 21st)

Olha Skrypnyk: Eleven years of the occupation of Crimea (Crimea Human Rights Group, 21 February)

Russian on trial for killing Ukrainian POW with his commander confirming ‘order to not take prisoners’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 19th)

Russia sentences Mariupol mother of four to 14 years on 'terrorism' and ‘treason’ charges (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 18th)

Russia passes 10-year sentence over two years after abducting and torturing 20-year-old Kherson student (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 17th)

Life Under Occupation (Alterpravo, January 2025)

The situation at the front, and peace talks

Weekly war summary: AFU counter attacks near Pokrovsk (The Insider, 22 February)

Wyborcza reports on Ukrainian border guards fighting on the front line (Eastern Frontier Initiative, 21 February)

The Betrayal of Ukraine: Week 2 (Russian Reader, February 17th)

News from Ukraine – general

Russia’s weaponization of elections in Ukraine given unexpected boost by President Trump (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 20th)

Russians destroy ancient wooden church in Andriivka – photos (Ukrainska Pravda, February 20th)

A coalition of Human Rights Organizations held a meeting on legislative changes for war victims (Zmina, February 20th)

Fractured Futures: Ukraine's Internally Displaced (Commons.com, February 19th)

Medicine, heating, reforms: How Trump’s aid freeze hit Ukraine (The Insider, February 18th)

War-related news from Russia

‘You could call me a partisan.’ Ruslan Siddiqi recounts his anti-war actions (People and Nature, February 19th)

How Russian servicemen bribe their way off the front line (iStories, 17 February)

Ukraine removed from rewritten history of WWII as Russia tries to justify its full-scale invasion (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 17th)

Xenophobia and Schools (Posle, February 12th)

Analysis and comment

Trump backs Putin against Ukraine. History turns darker (People and Nature, February 23rd)

About the organization of anarchists in Ukraine: point of view of a member of a local action collective (Takku, February 23rd)

Statement of Ukrainian Non-Governmental Organizations on the Impossibility of Holding Democratic Elections without the Sustainable Peace (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 21st)

The US sees China as its main global rival (Michael Karadjis, Facebook, February 19th)

Conspiracy of American and Russian imperialism behind Ukraine's back (Lis-Isl, February 17th)

Hanna Perekhoda: The fight for freedom in Ukraine is intimately linked to the global struggle against fascist forces (Cross-border Talks, February 16th)

Ukraine's defeat and the fall of Western power (Owen Jones Battlelines, February 14th)

Research of human rights abuses

Four women's stories of torture in Russian captivity (Ukrainska Pravda, February 20th)

90% without documents: report on prisoners deported to Russia (Zmina, February 14th)

International solidarity

A fundraiser for Roman Nasryev's cassation! (Solidarity Zone, FB, February 21st)

Permanent settlement for refugees! (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, February 20th)

Members of the European Parliament showed solidarity by writing 150 letters to Ukrainian political prisoners (Zmina, February 20th)

Upcoming events

Monday 24 February – Monday 3 March. Call for a week of action by Solidarity Collectives. Details of events here.

Wednesday-Thursday 26-27 March. Left solidarity with Ukraine conference in Brussels, supported by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine

 🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.


We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


We are now on Facebook and Substack! Please subscribe and tell friends. Better still, people can email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com, and we’ll send them the bulletin direct every Monday. The full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine is going into its third year: we’ll keep information and analysis coming, for as long as it takes.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 135

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Five Hundred And Ninety Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 2532

 

A Morning Thought @ 2531

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 10-March-2025.

Photo: Wikipedia.

I started out to read Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War with a certain amount of trepidation. The blurb gave the idea that Sarkar was going to challenge identity politics and some of the puerile practices of discussions on the left. But she was part of much of what it seemed she was going to challenge and criticise. I feared reading it would be a complete waste of time and like another reviewer I would have to take up daytime drinking just to get to the end of the book. I didn’t, though there are parts that would have been easier to read under the influence and others for which I am thankful I had a clear head.

Sarkar sets out her stall and her left-wing credentials early on, informing us that like my good self she first read the The Communist Manifesto at the age of 13, describing it as a “slim, breathless pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto was intended to be passed from hand to hand amongst workers.” Something that alas many left wingers forget. The purpose of writing is to communicate, not to always produce a text you need a PhD to understand and which is written for some obtuse intellectual elite. She states:

Sorry to the Oxford debating nerds out there, but it’s not a battle of bons mots in the marketplace of ideas. Instead, Marx and Engels theorised that social transformation happens when an economic class becomes strong enough, or big enough, to overthrow the one above it.

In other words, you have to organise, you have to put your flowery prose into action with the mass of the population.

This is the crux of the matter. She claims the book is going to show:

…how culture, politics and unequal stakes in the economy combine to fragment, weaken and inhibit working-class power….

…if you can’t see the world clearly, you can’t change it. I’ll show you how the media and much of our political class collaborate to make identity-driven conflicts – the so-called ‘culture wars’ – the most prominent issues of the day.

But it wasn’t just the media and political class that did that. Many on the left, including those, who like Sarkar, style themselves as Marxists contributed to it and continue to do so, engaging in Cancel Culture, social and economic ostracisation, harassment of those they disagree with, even when it is only one disagreement on one point and there is agreement on practically everything else.

What we’ll see… is that the left unwittingly forged the political weapons being used against it by our political opponents. We created an inverse hierarchy, where those most recognised as victims wield the most power. But the problem is we defined a victim as being anyone who claimed that status, rather than agreeing on any kind of material unit of measurement. Without meaning to, the left opened the door for powerful people to tactically present themselves as victims – and tie us up in the knots of our own obsession with grievance.

She gives numerous examples of this throughout the book, as well as some of what Jonathan Haidt described in his book The Coddling of the American Mind i.e. the I am offended brigade and the shrill shriek of liberal students trying to shut down debate on the filmiest of grounds. She amusingly points to being taken to task by a student for not referring to the characters in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as African-Americans. Sarkar had described them as black, the student blissfully and ignorantly unaware that the novel is set in the Congo, not the USA. She doesn’t labour this point, but my own experience is that much of the debate on the left has all the intellectual gravitas of the idiot who challenged her, the gift that keeps on giving to the media and the right.

She challenges identity politics, but only up to a point and much of the later part of the book is taken up with how the right have taken advantage of identity politics discourse and weaponised it rather than looking at what the left can do to stop tearing itself apart over the issue. And there is one identity, I will deal with later, that she won’t let go of, even when talking about other things like racism. She is at her best when talking about race, and challenging individualistic notions of identity politics, a term she reminds the reader was invented by a group of black women in the 1970s seeking to reach out to other oppressed groups, including the working class. She makes great play of the 2011 riots following the murder of Mark Duggan by police as an example of unity by blacks, Asians and whites. She talks critically about the idea of white privilege but underestimates just how pernicious the whole notion is. She ridicules the idea proposed at conference she attended to abolish all organisations that were not 51% non-white in an 80% white country. But says of just how far this nonsense goes that “I don’t think that you’d see someone arguing in real life that Anne Frank had white privilege.”

Actually, you would. There was a debate on that exact issue on Twitter (which perhaps is not real life, though Sarkar herself says it is where the political and media class spend a lot of their time), leading many commentators and even Jewish organisations to respond to it. In fairness, at Novara Media they dismissed it as a silly discussion and dismissively attributed it to someone who was probably a 14 year old.[1] I am not so sure. In Ireland the leader of the Social Democrats, Catherine Murphy, stated in the Dáil (Irish parliament) that “While it is true that the Irish have known our fair share of oppression, the reality is that during that oppression we still maintained our invisibility cloak of white privilege.”[2] To be clear, our oppression included a famine that left 1.5 million dead and many more forced to emigrate, whilst the British exported food from the country. Identity politics is nuttier than she thinks, and more divisive - and Murphy was no 14 year old.

There are parts of the book that are worth reading, if only to read about examples of the right weaponising nonsense, faking reports and creating moral panics around a whole host of issues. She takes many of these stories apart, including one involving people complaining about asylum seekers behaving terribly, cashing cheques in the local post office etc. Except of course the area in question hadn’t a single asylum seeker, but had lots of people on hand to give first-hand accounts of exactly that which puts it on a par to alien abduction stories, with all the lurid details and credibility of someone reared on too many sci-fi films. In fighting racism we have all come across such ridiculous stories and “eye-witnesses”.

But the book does not do what she said it set out to do. The weapons the left forged that are now being used against it are barely mentioned. Zionists have weaponised Hate Speech legislation to ban Palestinian marches in many parts of Europe. From the river to the sea is classified as hate speech. People have lost their jobs over tweets made on their own personal twitter account. Sarkar is aware of this and recently wrote an article on the use of identity politics by Zionists to silence pro-Palestinian voices.[3] She does deal with this in the book as well. Though, Zionists are not weaponising identity politics they have the copyright on it and Cancel Culture as well. It was they who set out to limit speech on campus, invoke offence in order to shut down debate and challenge people over their language. Many of the weapons stridently raised in discussions, such as being offended, needing a trigger warning, microagressions etc, are all on display in the media over Palestine. These are the weapons the left argued for and got, ones the state was only too happy to give them. They are not a Zionist aberration, they are the flip side of the same coin many on the left, including herself were only too happy to play.

Not just in Britain either. Recently a French TV journalist Jean Michel Aphatie was suspended for comparing Nazi massacres in France to French massacres in Algeria.[4] Anyone who knows anything about Algeria would know that such a statement is not only true, but blindingly obvious. Yet, he caused offence and had to go. Identity politics was never just a left-wing thing, the right did not weaponise it as Sarkar claims, but rather it is a reactionary idea that the left borrowed from the right. It would seem that Sarkar with this book is trying to put some distance between herself and some of the more stupid examples of left identity politics. But it is difficult to believe her. She seems to want to have her cake and eat it too.

The one identitarian issue she is determined to keep pushing and is given a pass is that of trans. She claims she does not want to shut down debate on this issue, though some of her pals at Novara and her mixed doubles partner Owen Jones could not say the same. Jones is a particularly vile creature, having repeatedly embraced and stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, with such frequency and fervour, you could be forgiven for thinking he was rehearsing for an audition for the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. She has described those who raise legitimate concerns as bigots, including in relation to the safety of women in prison (a place she is unlikely to ever see the inside of, now that she is firmly ensconced in the middle class). She acknowledges that some male inmates have been violent towards women, such as the sex offenders Karen White and Isla Bryson, but goes on to argue that where trans serve their sentences should be decided on a case-by-case basis, ignoring that both White and Bryson were decided on that basis and that Bryson’s transfer to a women’s prison was one of the issues that brought down Nicola Sturgeon. To be clear, Bryson a.k.a Adam Graham is a double rapist. Around the same time Andrew Burns a.k.a Tiffany Scott was also due to be transferred to a woman’s prison. He is a man so dangerous that he “is one of only some 100 offenders in Scotland subject to an Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR), meaning he will only be released when he is no longer considered an "unmanageable risk to public safety".[5] In the name of identity politics Sarkar is willing to brush these concerns under the carpet.

I have neither the energy nor the inclination to go over much of the dishonest debate she has engaged in on the issue and repeats in the book. But in her appeal for unity on the basis of class, who is included and excluded? Are left-wing gender critical feminists included? It is not clear, though we should be thankful she did not mention how right-wing gender critical feminists rushed into the arms of Tommy Robinson and those that didn’t, like Julie Bindel, are busy defending Zionism. I suspect that on many of the points raised in the book, Sarkar will flip further down the road. She is a pundit and has probably sensed which way the wind is blowing and seen some writing on the wall. But the book is unconvincing in its message. The one issue that has lead to people losing jobs, been excluded, harried and harassed and even physically assaulted is the trans issue. She is dismissive of the idea of Cancel Culture, even though Zionists cancelled Norman Finkelstein, a man I would like to think she admires. Many lesser-known people have been cancelled on this issue, even pro Palestinian Jews have been excluded from Palestine solidarity events because they are gender critical. So, if it not clear whether women who raise concerns and objections on this issue are included, it is not clear whether Sarkar’s appeal at the end of the book to take back our sense of comradeship with one another is real.

Are there any issues or circumstances in which comrades could be cancelled, silenced, excluded? There are left organisations who will have nothing to do with anyone who does not agree 100% on the trans issue with them. Dissent is tolerated on any issue except this one. They will not engage with them on any level and this includes issues as far removed from trans as climate change. You fall foul of them on that one issue you are toast. Are there any other issues? We don’t know. She doesn’t say.

What is in doubt is her sincerity. You get no sense of any self-criticism on the issues she looks at. She was part of it all, but the book reads like she was a fly on the wall the whole time. It is hard to trust someone who won’t own up to their mistakes, criticism is fine, but self-criticism is better. If a book review were written like a child’s school report it would say “Good effort, must try harder.”

There are better books that deal with the issues raised such as Haidt and Lukianoff’ book The Coddling of the American Mind, Asad Heider’s Mistaken Identity and Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come To It. Times are tough, spend your money wisely.

[1] Novara Media (21/12/2022) The most pointless twitter discourses of 2022. Moya Lothian-McClean. 

[2] See.

[3] Novaramedia (27/02/2025) How the Pro-Israel Right Used Identity Politics to Crush Palestine Solidarity. Ash Sarkar. 

[4] The Guardian (09/02/2025) Journalist quits role after comparing French actions in Algeria to Nazi massacre. AFP.

[5] The Daily Record (30/08/2017) Court put in lockdown as dangerous ‘dirty protest’ transexual appears in dock half naked. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Ash Sarkar 🪶 Not Quite Letting Go. Minority Rule 🔖 A Review

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