Pochin is from a party intent on purging this country of non-white people. Of course she’d have a problem with the real world. But many of the people empowering or amplifying those like her, they don’t have that excuse.
Ask Sir Keir “Island of Strangers” Starmer about Sarah Pochin.
Ask the Prime Minister how we’ve arrived at a place where a sitting MP can feel empowered enough to say, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”.
Ask Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who seems to have forgotten his boss evoked the race hate dripping from Enoch Powell’s notorious racist Rivers of Blood speech, earlier this year.
Ask Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who laughed (check the footage) as Starmer accused another MP, Liz Saville Roberts, of “talking rubbish” in the Commons when she called him out on it. The climate has been fomenting for years.
Ask Boris “Muslim women wearing burqas look like letter boxes and bank robbers” Johnson, who doubled down on his remarks in 2018.
Ask Theresa “Go home vans” May, whose hostile environment and immigration policies were the forerunners to the Tory and Reform extremism we see today.
Ask the breakfast shows that have allowed xenophobes and racists to rage-bait and drip-feed their poisonous, alarmist culture wars into the nation’s bloodstream for social media likes and retweets.
Ask the big media platforms that continue to give airtime to defeated Reform candidates in by-elections instead of the winners. Ask Kemi Badenoch, who claimed earlier this year that “peasants” from “sub-communities” in some countries are the ones in grooming and rape gangs.
Ask Badenoch’s replacement-in-waiting, Katie Lam, who boldly claimed last week that she wants to deport legally settled Black and Asian people to make the UK “culturally coherent”.
Ask the BBC’s Question Time, to which Reform and its leader Nigel Farage have a season ticket – despite his defiant, xenophobic rhetoric and the fact he has less than one percent of Westminster’s 650 MPs. Talk about overrepresentation.
Ask Farage himself, the man who accused then-PM Rishi Sunak of not understanding “our culture” in June 2024.
Ask Sunak, after his “joke” that people complimented his “tan” while out on the campaign trail. Ask proven political liars like Robert Jenrick, who complained of not seeing a white face in Handsworth. Or Suella Braverman, who complained of a “hurricane of immigration” in a live televised conference speech two years ago. Ask ITV, who helped to normalise Farage by allowing him onto their flagship reality TV show, I’m A Celebrity.
Ask the media outlets determined to make a martyr of Lucy Connolly, the housewife jailed for her tweet urging hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire. Ask the decision-makers at outlets that took it upon themselves to decide mass deportation was and still is a legitimate political policy.
Ask the outlets that broadcast, live to the nation, the racist invective masquerading as party conference speeches from Reform and the Conservative Party.
Ask Starmer, who was forced to clarify his comments ahead of last year’s election when he said: “At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed.”
Ask Tory donor Frank Hester – who claimed Diane Abbott should be shot dead and insisted seeing the Labour MP made him want to hate all Black women.
Ask the rioters shouting ‘Stop the boats’ as they burnt down Asian businesses, broke into asylum hotels to attack occupants and dragged Black people from their cars in last year’s riots. Ask them what they felt gave them the green light. Sneerer Pochin did not make her racist remarks in isolation. The UK air has been thick with racism for years. From all sides of the House and across the media landscape. Social media has simply turbo-charged it to the point where Pochin believed no-one would bat an eyelid at her words.
She has since given one of those “sorry, not sorry” apologies where she’s doubled down, insisting her words were “phrased poorly” but that her sentiment stands. For clarity, deep breath, ads are diverse because global brands want to reflect the real world. It’s as simple as that.
Pochin is from a party intent on purging this country of non-white people. Of course she’d have a problem with the real world. But many of the people empowering or amplifying those like her, they don’t have that excuse.
They can’t try to claim solidarity now.