The wall-to-wall chorus of condemnation of Sarah Pochin’s remarks last week about woke advertising has been hysterical even by the left’s standards. ‘Sarah Pochin’s comments were a disgrace’, fulminated Labour’s X account, ‘and Nigel Farage’s silence is deafening.’ David Lammy said the remarks were ‘mean, nasty and racist’ and wants her sacked. Health Secretary Wes Streeting used his weekend media rounds to repeatedly barrack the Runcorn and Helsby MP, even arguing her intervention proves Reform are ‘not fit to govern’. Backbenchers no one has ever heard of are calling for Pochin to lose the whip.
Pochin’s intervention began with what was admittedly rather poorly chosen language. On Friday, Reform’s second newest MP told Talk: ‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people who are anything other than white.’ Labour’s subsequent attack ads simply cut there. But she went on to make a valid point that anyone who watches TV will have noticed. ‘It doesn’t reflect our society’, she said, ‘and I feel that your average white… family is not represented anymore in TV advertising.’ Pochin criticised woke ‘arty-farty’ advertising executives for only portraying life ‘inside the M25’, meaning the hyper-diverse adverts audiences see are ‘not representative of the rest of the country’. She has since said the remarks were ‘phrased poorly’ but maintains that many adverts today are ‘unrepresentative of British society’.
Pochin has pointed out Labour’s hypocrisy
While critics have suggested she started ranting about this out of the blue, it was in fact a caller who raised the issue. Stuart from London wanted to know whether Reform would do anything about what he sees as adverts failing to show what Britain really looks like. (He’s quite right in this assessment: a recent Channel 4 study, for instance, found that while black people account for around 4 per cent of the UK population, they appear in more than 50 per cent of commercials.)
Stuart added that there was a ‘demonisation of white people’, who routinely appear in adverts as the butt of the joke or in government information campaigns as an anti-social menace (like a recent Transport for London anti-harassment campaign, among many others). One might also think of much-vaunted TV-cum-agitprop like Adolescence, in which the show’s implausible cypher for the scourge of teenage knife crime is a sensitive, white, middle-class boy who loves the Victorian industrialist Isambard Kingdom Brunel. To wit, the enforced diversification of historical dramas is now increasingly hard to escape. The fact is that the ideological bent of much cultural output today has become so relentless and so on the nose that many people have started to take notice. Why shouldn’t an MP acknowledge and articulate these concerns?
More than that, though, it requires an extraordinary brass neck for Labour to go after people for complaining about under-representation in any field in public life. This is the party, after all, that gave us the Public Sector Equality Duty, the clause that launched a thousand diversity schemes. Before the last election, Labour was forced to end 30 years of all-women shortlists because it had discriminated against prospective male MPs for so long it risked being in violation of its own Equality Act. As for ethnic ‘representation’, it has previously pledged to go even further in this parliament with a ‘Race Equality Act’, a vehicle for extensive discriminatory social engineering.
In response to Labour’s criticism, Pochin has pointed out this hypocrisy. She tweeted a speech given in 2020 by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who supposedly disclaims sectarianism, in which he complained vociferously that too many leading officials in (93 per cent white) Scotland were ‘white’. Unlike Pochin’s off-the-cuff remarks in response to a punter on Talk radio, this was a prepared speech in Holyrood. When Pochin asked Wes Streeting what his response was, he simpered that Sarwar’s identitarian rant was a ‘powerful point about a lack of representative leadership in Scotland’. 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.
If Labour hasn’t got a leg to stand on in this debate, the sound and fury over this trivial issue points to its political exhaustion. Just over a year into Starmer’s government, that was the real story behind its repeated attacks on Reform for being ‘divisive’ at last month’s party conference.
Every time Labour tries to shift the conversation onto ‘values’ in this way, it’s an admission of how it’s failing on policy. Ed Miliband’s lunatic green agenda continues to hammer British industry; a punishing Budget looms; and for all Shabana Mahmood’s ‘tough-as-nails’ rhetoric, the boats have not stopped coming. Lacking any meaningful policy achievements to speak of, Labour would sooner focus on whether opposing MPs’ language is sufficiently deferent to liberal pieties. We’re often told that it’s Reform who are pursuing a ‘culture war’; the reality is that such petty, woke outrage campaigns seem to be the only remaining page in Morgan McSweeney’s playbook.
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