Poor Sarah Pochin. It must be so frustrating when your party spends so much time defending itself against accusations of racism, only for you to torpedo the whole thing in seconds. The Reform MP recently went on a TalkTV call-in to respond to listeners’ questions, where she said: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people that are basically anything other than white”. (She later apologised and said that her comments were “phrased poorly”.)
Nigel Farage has only said that he is “unhappy” with the Runcorn and Helsby MP but “understands the basic point” that his first female MP was trying to make. Which begs the question: What was Pochin’s point, exactly?
Because I am a glutton for punishment, I watched the full video of her comments on YouTube, which I highly recommend if you want to give yourself an aneurysm about the state of British politics. Pochin went on to say: “I feel that your average white family is not represented anymore. How many times do you look at a TV advert and think, ‘There’s not a single white person on it?’”
In the interest of fairness, I spent an afternoon watching Freeview to see if Pochin was indeed correct (I know, it’s a hard life). Within a few minutes of sticking my telly on, I saw a Shell advert featuring a smiley brunette white lady and Will Best (also white) promote his Hits Radio breakfast show. A middle-aged man (white) promoted a Flash speed mop on a Channel 5 ad; a lovely family (all white) then tried their best to sell me on Fairy liquid detergent on Channel 4. You get the picture.
Clearly, Pochin doesn’t actually watch a lot of television, not that it stopped her from confidently opining that “British adverts have gone DEI mad”. Was she correct?
Well, a recent Channel 4 report into on-screen diversity did find that black people feature in 51 per cent of adverts on television but crucially, they only took a lead role in 23 per cent of these ads and their screen time was more fleeting. For some, this level of representation registers as an outrageous form of racial oppression. But that sentiment is also out of step with the general public. The same report goes on to find that more than half of the UK “actively champion or support DEI” while only 12 per cent are self-proclaimed non-supporters. “Yet it is this minority that dominates headlines, creating a distorted picture of public opinion and fuelling fear of backlash,” the report states.
If anything, Pochin’s comments are emblematic of the current vibes-based discourse around race in the UK, in which the truth doesn’t matter – merely an inchoate sense that Everything Is Bad and the Foreigners Are to Blame.
Pochin’s comments shore up Reform’s false reality, parroted in different and arguably subtler ways in their speeches and campaigning, that white people are somehow on the back foot. Right now, the advertising industry is in the firing line, but it could just as easily be blamed on the EU, migrants, the deep state and/or the Blob (take your pick). You can sum up the prevailing attitude as: “What I said is fake, but also it isn’t because it represents something that feels real to me.”
Perhaps it would be laughable if it wasn’t so frightening. If you find yourself so exercised by the notion that black or brown people have orchestrated a hostile takeover of ad space in order to sell you dishwasher tablets, I suggest you go outside and touch some grass.
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But when I heard Pochin on TalkTV utter those words “anything other than white”, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Labour frontbencher Wes Streeting was absolutely on the money when he described these comments as racist, but these words – from a politician representing a party that is currently leading the polls – are more than that. They’re chilling.
As a journalist and author who has written about British history, they hark back to the dark days of the 1950s and 60s in which “no blacks, no Irish” signs were put up in bedsit and shop windows. They are reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, in which he claimed that in 10 to 15 years “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.
Pochin’s words speak to a much deeper, age-old sense of racial grievance in our politics – one that doesn’t pay heed to fact or truth and fixates on all the wrong enemies and issues. This country is facing deep-seated problems – you just need to look at NHS wait times or our intractable housing crisis to know that. Reform would prefer to have people shouting at their television sets and each other, rather than come together and fix the country they claim to love so much.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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