Ash Sarkar

speaker

192 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 26 Feb

Ash Sarkar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Pod Save the UK · Are we stuck in never-ending political scandal? w/Ash Sarkar · 26 Feb 2026 podcast

And maybe that would be simple enough if you could just be like, okay, well, he's a new Labour relic.

This is a new, new Labour.

problem is Starmer appointed him to be his American ambassador, when a lot of this stuff, at least about him retaining a friendship with Epstein post-conviction, that was already in the public domain.

So then that brings in the new generation of Labour Party apparatchiks.

Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, Labour Together, the organisation which campaigned for Keir Starmer to get the leadership.

We've got this story with Josh Simons now, who was a director of Labour Together after Morgan McSweeney, whether or not he paid private investigators basically to smear working journalists who are looking into the operations of Labour Together.

So it just seems to keep growing and growing because it's not just about Epstein being this uniquely horrendous, monstrous character.

What it does is that it sheds light on the kind of networks and operations of people in power.

So on this question of who do politicians work for, like is it the people, is it capital?

I think the best way to understand politicians as a class is to think of them as being intermediaries between democracy and capital.

And their job is to effectively manage democracy so it doesn't become too difficult for capital.

Because in a way, politicians aren't that different from dogs, right?

They respond to reward and punishment.

And they've worked out that capital can punish them more effectively than people ever can.

And so there are lots of reasons for that.

Discuss this in the book.

There's electoral geography, there's the bond markets, there's the sort of overall depoliticization of society, the decline of trade unions, et cetera, et cetera.

over the years politicians have increasingly become capital's man and I think you see that with Palantir right it's a huge government contract right 240 million I think basically handed out without a full tender process now the tender processes are already a crock of shit they're basically designed so that these huge corporations who are good at one thing which is bidding and winning government contracts not necessarily good at delivering the thing that they're supposed to be doing

not even that happened when it came to Palantir.

So there are some questions of going who set up the meetings, who was in charge of making that decision and why is it that we have a political class which is so comfortable with giving hundreds of millions of taxpayer money to American corporations who, you know, I think Palantir's got some pretty disgusting practices particularly when it comes to surveillance and their role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

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