Sarah Pochin Was Right

The UK has been engulfed in a pretty absurd row for the past few days. Last Saturday, Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin was a guest on Talk TV. While she was there, a caller phoned in to complain about the overrepresentation of ethnic-minority actors in adverts on British television. These ads, the caller said, “don’t represent what this country looks like,” and this skewed vision of Britain is encouraging “positive demonisation of white people.” Pochin agreed, adding: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” 

Pochin’s words have since sparked cross-party outrage, and she has been branded with the dreaded ‘r’ word. Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting called her comments “a disgrace” and “racist.” “Reform is a party,” he added, “who thinks that our flag only belongs to some of us who look like me, not all of us who have built this country.” Tory shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp initially refused to call Pochin racist, but then changed his mind, saying that her statement was “completely wrong and yes it was racist.” Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey called it “racism, pure and simple.” Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself said that Pochin’s words were a display of “shocking racism.” 

Context is important here. It should be obvious that Pochin wasn’t saying that the mere sight of any non-white actor sends her into a fury—rather, that the unnecessary shoehorning of ‘diversity’ into every facet of our lives was exhausting. Reform leader Nigel Farage thankfully understands this, and has resisted the hysterical calls to suspend Pochin from the party. He acknowledged that her words were ill phrased and “ugly,” but that he “understood the basic point”—that what we see on TV does not remotely represent reality. As Pochin herself clarified in a later statement, “The point I was trying to make is that the British advertising-agency world has gone DEI mad and many adverts are now unrepresentative of British society.” 

Of course, television is not real life. There is no obligation for every advert, film, or show to reflect the exact proportions of society. Attempting to do so will inevitably lead to the kind of tedious, diversity-obsessed box-ticking that we see now. But it’s hard to ignore the message being shouted, loud and clear, from DEI-fanatical marketing campaigns these days—that white people should be less visible. 

Pochin’s remarks are backed up by data. Channel 4 has been tracking ethnic diversity in adverts and found that marketing was “skewed” towards featuring black actors. In 2019, 37% of the 1,000 ads studied featured black actors—despite black Britons making up just 3% of the population in 2011. This year, the results are similar. In the top 500 adverts, around half of the actors were black. Once again, the black population of Britain is roughly 4%. 

It should not be considered racist to point out these facts. And plenty of Brits agree. According to a study conducted by Eric Kaufmann, director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, 40% of people believed it was not racist to criticise the overrepresentation of black people in advertisements. Similarly, 53% thought that it wasn’t racist to complain that there were too few white people in ads. This suggests that, although Pochin’s phrasing might have been crass, most people think that merely pointing out that media is skewed towards one ethnic group and away from another is not inherently hateful or bigoted. 

Indeed, we hear the opposite complaint made by leftists all the time. For years, discourse has centred around the illusive concept of ‘representation’ in the media, politics, academics, and elsewhere. Left-wing identitarians are positively obsessed with making sure that every possible kind of person can see his- or herself reflected everywhere, even in places where it doesn’t make sense. A good example of how illogical this demand is comes from Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who in 2020 moaned about the fact that 93% of Scottish officials were white—something that is not too surprising when you consider that Scotland as a country is around 96% white. When Pochin brought up Sarwar’s words to Wes Streeting, he squirmed. Sarwar, Streeting claimed, had made a “powerful point about a lack of representative leadership in Scotland.” This patently nonsensical, not only because Scotland’s leadership is almost perfectly representative of its population, but also because Sarwar was simply making Pochin’s point in reverse. But, as Laurie Wastell wrote in the Spectator recently, “as everyone knows, the ‘diversity’ game the Left loves to play is unashamedly two-tier: calling for fewer whites, good; calling for more whites, bad.” 

I’m reminded of a row that broke out in Germany this summer, over cheese packaging, of all things. Milram, a German brand, released a set of limited edition packet designs. Instead of cheese, the packaging would now depict various scenes of German multiculturalism in that God-awful Corporate Memphis-adjacent style—a pink-haired woman laughing with her ethnically diverse group of friends, a mixed-race family walking their dog, what looks like a same-sex couple gazing lovingly at one another (mixed race, naturally). In Germany, a country that is generally a few years behind the Anglosphere when it comes to woke discourse, this sparked a heated debate. On the Right, people angrily vowed to boycott Milram. On the Left, people shouted down critics for being ‘racist.’ Deutsches Milchkontor, to which Milram belongs, released a statement defending the design changes as being “what Milram stands for: community and enjoyment. Colourfully illustrated, diverse, modern.”  This was about, let’s not forget, cheese. I cannot fathom why anyone would care what this company “stands for.” Cheese doesn’t have to be “diverse” or “modern.” It just has to be cheese. 

These debates often feel over-played or just plain silly. But the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities is one of the most visible aspects of woke, and one that most people cannot escape. It is the case across practically every Western European nation that non-white actors are disproportionately featured in commercials—in Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK, we have the numbers to prove this. Every time you turn on your television, watch a YouTube video, or pass a billboard, we are reminded that we still live under the thumb of a race-obsessed ideology. Yes, these might ‘just’ be adverts. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that they don’t represent something larger. It’s worth asking, for example, why we don’t see the same trend towards non-white actors in adverts and campaigns that have a more negative message? White men in suits are, for whatever reason, disproportionately cast as sex pests in campaigns against harassment on public transport, depicted leering at mixed-race young women. No doubt this dynamic has played out before, but are we really experiencing a plague of sexually inappropriate commuting businessmen? Or remember when Netflix’s Adolescence convinced the political classes both at home and abroad that we were seeing a scourge of young white boys being radicalised by Andrew Tate into murdering their female classmates? Despite being ‘just’ a fictional TV show, Adolescence was treated by many—including Keir Starmer—as a documentary, and the nation was forced to suffer through weeks of hectoring about this nonexistent problem. 

None of this is to say that having any kind of diversity in adverts is inherently bad. Ideally, this is something that none of us should even have to pay attention to. It makes no difference whether a product or service is advertised using a black or white, Muslim or Christian, gay or straight actor. But people do resent the feeling that they are being constantly lectured by the powers that be—that their very existence is being erased at best, and demonised at worst. It certainly shouldn’t be considered ‘racist’ to speak up about these feelings. 

Sarah Pochin’s words were clumsy, yes, and it’s unsurprising that they were misconstrued by many. But she captured a sentiment that is familiar to plenty of Brits, and other Western Europeans besides. And who can blame them? People are tired of being told they are evil for simply existing.