Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick of all the blacks everywhere. And the Asians. Un-accountably, perhaps, you will be accused of racism, the definition of the term having been extended rather further than my interpretation: to discriminate against an individual on the grounds of his or her race. There will be outrage among the deluded; there will be faux outrage among the opportunistic. Your own party leader will slap you down by saying, in effect: ‘Well, she’s right, obvs, but you can’t say stuff like that.’
And her own leader is not wrong. The Overton window may have shifted but it hasn’t yet been smashed. Pochin’s words were, as Mr Farage put it, ‘ugly’, although I suspect that for Nigel the least beautiful aspect was the gift it gave his party’s political opponents, i.e. everyone involved in
politics who isn’t actually a supporter of Reform. (For verification of that, I would direct you to the Caerphilly Senedd by-election. It was Reform vs the Rest. And that is how it is going to be until the next election.) Sir Keir Starmer described Pochin’s outburst as ‘shocking racism’; the increasingly irritating munchkin Wes Streeting simply went for ‘racist’. It all helps to portray Reform as a racist party, everything the left had always told you they were – and so people with delicate sensibilities will refrain from voting for them.
One of the big changes in the past year has been the fairly sudden acceptability of Reform to a mass of people. A couple of years ago when I asked locals in my Weardale town what way they were voting, they would mumble or turn away and maybe mutter under their breaths: ‘Reform.’ These days they say it loud and proud: former Tories, former Labour voters, even former Liberals. And part of that success and why Reform is edging towards 35 per cent in the polls – which is roughly what they will need to win an election – is down to having tiptoed with some dexterity along the fissure which, Manichean-wise, demarcates racism from non-racism. Or what the establishment considers racism, at least. The establishment plus Lucy Powell, for whom almost everything is a ‘dog whistle’, possibly because she does not understand the meaning of the term, being dimmer than any human being has a right to be.
I suspect that the gist of what Pochin said has been echoed in the homes of about 60 or 70 per cent of the country – beyond London, beyond Bristol, in the towns and in the shires – even if they might not have expressed themselves quite in the way she did. They may, rather, have simply been laughing to themselves. Since about 2020, when black and Asian people were slightly overrepresented in TV adverts (compared with their proportion of the population), there has been a huge surge in advertisers employing affirmative action to the point where the scenes depicted differ so markedly from the reality that they at times appear surreal and ludicrous.
My objection is that it is transparent grandstanding and we are being sold a pup, we are being told a lie
As the Guardian reported this week – and one could wish for no more valuable conduit when it comes to talking about racism – ‘In 2020, 37 per cent of adverts featured black people; that number increased to 45 per cent in 2021 and 51 per cent in 2022 before a decline in 2023 to 49 per cent. The 2021 census showed that 4 per cent of the population of England and Wales is black.’ That figure of 51 per cent, absurd and embarrassing, excludes Asian people – and while they do get a look-in, it is nothing to the patronage heaped upon the shoulders of our black community. The year 2022 was the peak of woke generally, I think, and there has been a slight tailing off in the past three years (down to 49 per cent). So black people are over-represented by at least 12 times their actual number. My objection to this is that it is transparent grandstanding and that we are being sold a pup, we are being told a lie. Especially in the prevalence of mixed-race families on screen (almost always black bloke, white woman, with an exquisitely cappuccino-coloured child).
But, as you know, it is not just the TV ads. Every single quiz show now has its quotas. They employ people to make sure that every episode has a black face on it and a gay and preferably a disabled contestant. I know someone who actually performed this task for a BBC quiz programme and was berated by the producer when one week he ended up with two dwarfs on the same show. ‘One dwarf is sufficient. We can’t have two of them,’ the producer raged. You may have noticed this yourself, watching recent editions of The Chase, Pointless, Tipping Point and so on – and then comparing them with the re-runs from six or seven years ago. These days it’s all quotas. Pointless is the most proactive quiz in this regard, which is why – if you are straight, white and not seriously physically impaired – you may look at the convocation of contestants and wonder: just who the hell are these people? Well, they’re simply representatives of communities who account for 4 per cent of the country (black people) or 3.8 per cent of the country (gay people) or 7.5 per cent (seriously disabled).
Of course, for those quotas to work, it requires disappointing an awful lot of people. In fact, disappointing thousands upon thousands of straight white Brits who have no idea that the reason they haven’t been selected for the show is precisely because they are straight white Brits. Potential candidates who very often have a far better chance of winning. All told, sorry, you were not successful this time. Which brings me back to the original point: what is the greater expression of racism? Discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin, or speaking in an ugly manner?
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