#2: An Argument

The If I Speak podcast

The other Sunday, my book club convened to discuss Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. Much of the conversation centred around the coalition building and whether the old school Left Klein invokes and often assumes is the natural home for many ‘dispossessed’ or marginalised groups meaningfully exists (anymore). So a lot of the conversation was about disagreement and potential excommunication for wrong terminology or questioning of the ‘correct’ positions.

We weren’t just talking about how that was an ego-based thing, which is often the main critique of the so-called censorious left: when Covid first broke out in late 2019 and early 2020, and anti-Chinese sentiment was leading to street harassment and violence, the theory that the virus was a leak from a Wuhan lab felt heavily laden with a racist implication that feels significantly weaker now that we have a vaccine. Also: did it actually matter where Covid-19 came from? But rather that we wanted its deadly transmission curtailed?

I joke sometimes that my job as a trade union organiser involves being professionally gobby but, despite my political stridence, I absolutely hate interpersonal conflict. My past has taught me that disagreements in the home can have painful consequences, so I can be really quite jittery and convinced I should or will die over objectively small things. Months after the event took place, I admitted to one of my housemates that her incredibly reasonable ask that I don’t put my fresh-out-the-machine laundry next to her almost-dried washing on the line caused such a spiral of guilt, shame and embarrassment that I did not have the tools to simply and uncomplicatedly express my own domestic needs and preferences home without forecasting the potential consequences, that I started looking on facebook spare room groups the same day as evidently the relationship was beyond repair. Reader, I can assure you I am aware that this is not healthy and enough work and progress has taken place in that time that I can now joke about the incident with friends, as I did this weekend. But I still don’t think I could disagree on air.

Enter Novara Media’s newest podcast If I Speak… hosted by Ash Sarkar and Moya Lothian-McLean. The show is a hybrid of personal-political and responding to reader dilemmas, and it’s basically the only thing from Novara I engage with. They probably wouldn’t like that I say this, as one frustratingly navel-gazing episode felt like they were berating their listeners and potential audience for not liking or seeing the value in their colleagues, Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker. The cost of working for an organisation that views itself as ‘the answer’ is scrutiny, and it’s not been a great year for the media outlet. Between public apologies to the Lubner family for Bastani laundering a narrative the Jewish Labour party donor had profited from Apartheid when they had not, to Walker losing the public and political argument on XL Bullies, the critiques aren’t just about leftish infighting and purity. This is boring, though — I don’t really engage because I find it a bit bro-y, and that’s fine because I accept their formats may have saved some guys from the manosphere and not everything is for me.

What I want to talk about is last week’s episode, where Moya wants to discuss what increasingly demure fashion trends tells us about a broader cultural shift towards conservativism and Ash, with Trump’s re-election firmly on her mind, is having none of it. Ash thinks the topic doesn’t say anything about the people who actually won the election for Trump, and that it’s an aesthetic shift that only has hit college-educated city types, so focusing on that is an inward-facing distraction from the real work of listening further afield (We are wearing little hoop earrings talking about women wearing little hoop earrings!). Moya thinks their audience comes to the show to hear about pop cultural trends alongside the political and feels Ash’s characterisation of the bubble she inhabits and the people she doesn’t listen to is flattening. The conversation is extended — it is not a couple of clipped exchanges followed by a swift subject change and extended round of answering readers’ questions — and I oscillated between thinking ‘the girls are fiiighting’ the way Azealia Banks once said it, and remembering I really ought to read the copy of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse I bought on the recommendation of Moya and others on twitter a few years ago. You definitely would not have got anything like it on The High Low.

It was a bracing Tuesday morning commute listen, but I think it’s an instructive example of what actual political conflict can look like. For what it’s worth, I think Ash jumped to a flattening of Moya’s position because of a certain amount of guilt and embarrassment she’s felt since the 2019 General Election exit poll dropped. Even if the aesthetic trends were only about graduate women in major cities (and I don’t think it is: the decree to cover up your tattoos before your wedding day does not feel particularly Hackney/Brooklyn/Glasgow Southside-dwelling, Marseille-holiday coded), it still would be worth discussing as that is one key part of a coalition of voters. They’re just not the only people who matter.

The show has been running for just under a year; here are my top episode recommendations if you want a flavour of it aside from last week’s show:

• Why is Andrew Tate’s manosphere so seductive? With writers and documentary makers Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin

• How will I know if I really want kids? with Renay Richardson. To put it simply, that episode was the reason I paid for an at-home fertility test kit this summer. But I am thinking about it all the time at the moment, so.

• I’m the problem it’s me — which introduced me to the distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘standards’ that is useful at a time where boundaries and toxicity in friendships and dating are unclarifying buzzwords

• Help! My partner’s too posh — a good conversation prompted by a reader dilemma