So throw the trans people, the disabled, the asylum seekers under the bus then? That's the way of modern centrism.

Of course not - it's not a question of either/or - and one of the key problems with identity politics is precisely this balkanisation of people into rival identities - it's a question of solidarity of all oppressed people, and opposing all systemic oppression.

@ChrisMayLA6

The very term "identity politics" is a right-wing psyop to drive that wedge between groups. Most of us on the Left and many in the centre understand intersectionality and we explicitly *don't* abandon one oppressed group for another.

Sarkar is correct to say that the right have used the *concept* of identity politics effectively to drive this wedge. The effect has been repealing trans rights, increased anti-immigrant bigotry, and at best indifference to the disabled.

Her solution is to abandon us, because otherwise the white cishet ableds will vote for the fash. This is what Walker did not long ago, and many of us wondered how long it would be before Ash left Novara. Instead, she's sold out.

So, the 'solution', must be a politics of solidarity? and a good basis for that (which of course I would say as a political economist) is class & inequality; the key thing, I think is not to reduce the scope of the working class but rather to expand it; my father used to say 'anyone who *has* to work is essentially working class' & when I say 'has to work' I mean has no independent means of survival - which is then about making up that absence through welfare too!

I'm getting genuinely frightened.

Accepting the framing of "Too much woke is why the Left are losing" is abandoning us. You'll find yourselves deciding trans rights aren't worth the trouble, lest it lose you votes. You'll decide that disability benefits just aren't popular among the aspirational people of the nation. You'll decide that punishment of asylum seekers sits well with the white working class voters you need to attract in order to have power.

In short you'll become Starmer's Labour, a hollowed-out shell of a former Party that has no purpose.

And the only price will be the people abandoned for votes, dying.

Well, I don't see how you're projecting that forward from what I typed, and indeed from the range of my previous posts.... but equally I can see that that would be looming as a danger among a certain cadre of Labour strategists (all too influential right now)

I don't understand how you can't see this, and that's what's frightening me.

Ash's argument is nothing more than "We should abandon fighting for minority rights because the white working class don't give a toss about that."