This week’s Twitter Bitch Fight is a left-wing box office blockbuster. In the red corner, it’s reformed Trotskyite Paul Mason. In the even redder corner, it’s literal communist Ash Sarkar. A fight for the ages…
The opening bell rang when Sarkar mocked a Redcar Labour Party campaign video which claimed “Tory cuts” had unleashed rampant crime on the local community. For uber cool online commies, streets rife with antisocial behaviour is the sort of thing only home county, pearl-clutching Tories should get het up about…
Kids on quad bikes, doing wheelies? Call Scotland Yard!
Fortunately Paul Mason was on-hand to point out that the footage clearly showed illegal behaviour, and was probably worth stopping:
Here you go: from the Northern Echo - and it's a problem in numerous working class communities, as this Walsall Police leaflet shows...oh, and age is a HRA protected characteristic for a reason: try getting out of the way if you're elderly or infirm pic.twitter.com/mK3HGGYYSf
— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) August 9, 2022
Sarkar was having none of it. She returned with a (far) left jab about Mason’s alleged leaked emails, which appeared to show him referring Novara and other left-wing outlets to the Foreign Office’s Counter Disinformation Unit for producing pro-Putin talking points. Awkward…
Shopping young people to the cops for riding quadbikes is nearly as risible as shopping leftwing media organisations to the security services.
— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) August 9, 2022
Mason is still claiming the contents of those leaks, including his brilliantly designed McCarthyite organogram, “may be edited, distorted or fake“. “May be”…
It was a Russian hack and leak operation that produced content that may be edited, distorted or fake. I was the victim of a serous crime. You are the victim of Russian disinformation. Read more about "tainted leak" operations here: https://t.co/mqMTlJ40Fz
Mason then tried changing the subject back to policing. To no avail…
1) I wrote an article criticising the police policy at the time.
— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) August 9, 2022
2) Answer the question – did you make a map which had an arrow pointing from Novara Media to the black community, yes or no?
At the time of going to pixel, Mason still hasn’t confirmed or denied whether he made the mind map. All in all, another entertaining bout. As always, Guido leaves it to co-conspirators to determine the winner…
Guido is pleased to report that after 100 minutes offline, Novara Media’s YouTube channel has been restored. It was inexplicably terminated this morning, without prior warning or explanation. So far, YouTube haven’t explained anything. Still, Guido is pleased the channel back online. Even those who vehemently disagree with Novara’s politics immediately lent their support to the team, including the editors of The Spectator and Gript, the political editor of The Sun, and, of course, our own editor. Tech platform censorship is obviously a serious problem, and it’s right to resist it whatever one’s individual politics. Ash and Aaron would do the same for us, right?
UPDATE: For our take on the freedom of speech implications watch our latest Guido Talks.
Guido clearly touched Novara’s nerves today after highlighting their low wage hypocrisy. Novara’s Ash Sarkar took the fight to Twitter, telling Guido to “f**k off into the sea.” Guido couldn’t possibly let Ash have the last word…
Ash Sarkar has slammed the “shameful” Labour Party for instructing shadow ministers to argue against a £15 minimum wage. Given Ash’s passionate diatribe one would expect all Novara Media staff to be paid at least £15 per hour. Wrong! Novara Media recently advertised for a “Social Media Editor” to be paid just £12.50 per hour. Incidentally, Guido pays a higher hourly rate to our lowest paid reporter…
Luckily for Ash, she isn’t the only minimum wage campaigner to underpay staff. Last week Guido exclusively revealed that Labour Party’s conference stewards are being paid less than £10 per hour, despite campaigning for a £10 minimum wage. Another classic example of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do activism…
UPDATE: The above article really touched a nerve at Novara Media, the ever-charming Ash Sarkar tweeted in reply:
So according to Ash, after a little bit of revisionism on the timing, they stopped paying “shamefully” low wages as long as February, 7 months ago, just coincidentally after they last advertised a job at “shamefully” low wages. The gross take home for that part-time job worked out at £1,200 monthly, even next week at the promised new raised rate it will still only pay £1,584 a month, which is £1,382.30 after tax. Not enough to live on in London and whomever takes that job will almost certainly have to get a second job to make ends meet. Unless they have rich parents…
Ash Sarkar was either hamming up her agreeableness for Politics Live’s more middle-class audience, or she’s performed a significant climbdown from her infamous Piers Morgan “I’m literally a Communist” outburst. Discussing whether young people are rejecting capitalism, Sarkar was asked by Tory MP Tom Hunt to name “a successful socialist country”. Ash responded:
“I’m with you in a critique of authoritarian socialism, I’m a democrat, I like political freedoms”
Give it another few years and she’ll be a Telegraph columnist at this rate…
Bad news for TrotsApp: Leadbeater won the Batley & Spen by-election. Having spent the last few weeks hoping a Labour loss would end Starmer’s leadership and enable a far-left takeover, the socialist crew are now cheering through gritted teeth at the result – all the while keen to remind Sir Keir it only proves he needs their “radical domestic policies” to survive, and pretending they aren’t furious they can’t replace him with John McDonnell.
- Owen Jones claimed this morning that “a possible electoral disaster is a certainty” if Starmer continues to pursue “more factional warfare”. In other words, if Starmer continues to try and distance himself from the Corbyn golden years.
- Aaron Bastani insisted Labour won by “keeping Starmer at safe distance“, and retweeted the astute analysis of Michael Walker (fellow Novara intellectual), who speculated whether Starmer “would come up with some ideas for once, or just intensify factional war against the left.” Because McDonnell / Rayner / Dawn Butler would be great unifiers…
- Ash Sarkar spent the morning calling Dan Hodges an “idiot pundit” and promoting her new book.
Angela Rayner, meanwhile, has tweeted to congratulate Kim Leadbeater “and the whole Labour team“. Oozing conviction…
