Sarah Pochin’s racist comments feed a dangerous narrative – as the target of abuse, I should know
Sarah Pochin MP delivers her speech at Reform UK Conference, September 2025 (Credit: Abdullah Bailey / Alamy)
4 min read
“It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of, you know, people that basically are anything other than white.”
I can only imagine how Sarah Pochin struggles to order her lunch in the tearoom – the high number of black staff must make her furious for being “unrepresentative of British society as a whole”.
The bizarre, reactionary, outburst from the Member of Parliament for Runcorn and Helsby during a radio phone-in last weekend on Talk TV was as clumsy as it was bigoted.
Much has already been said and written about Pochin’s comments, decried by politicians across the House; she even earned herself a public rebuke from Nigel Farage. Put simply, her comments were racist, and – while they may not have been abusive or illegal – they certainly told everyone who she really is. Racism that also raises serious questions about her record as a magistrate.
As somebody who receives a quite staggering amount of online racial abuse, much of it fuelled by the subtext of the narrative being promoted by a handful of Members of Parliament, I feel well qualified to comment.
As just four per cent of the population, black people are statistically over-represented across television adverts as a whole. This isn’t part of a grand conspiracy to erase white men, nor is it “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] mad”. It’s because companies are trying to hawk their wares to as broad a range of consumers as possible and that means covering all the bases. Anyone looking at adverts with an expectation of seeing an accurate reflection of British demography is likely to be disappointed. This should be obvious to anybody who has ever seen an advert before.
As the product of an inter-racial relationship, who is in an inter-racial relationship myself, I’m arguably the target demographic for the very adverts that cause Sarah Pochin such discomfort. My personal view is that the over-representation of black people in adverts does feel tokenistic. It doesn’t, however, “drive me mad”; advertising is, by its very nature, cynical and exploitative.
Earlier this year I led a backbench business debate on knife crime amongst children and young people during which I specifically addressed the cynical exploitation of black culture in advertising as a cheap way to make products appear “urban” or “edgy”. In extremis this has led to major brands leveraging the very worst aspects of black culture, valorising criminality and promoting individuals with criminal convictions.
Had Pochin made her argument by highlighting the cynicism of modern advertising, it could have been an insightful, discursive point about how the media too often lean into a narrative that sees black people feted only as athletes or entertainers or portrayed as criminals.
To pitch her comments as she did, subsequently describing advertising as having gone “DEI mad”, they instead feed an altogether more pernicious narrative. DEI is almost exclusively used in this context as shorthand for non-white rather than women, those with disabilities or other minority groups. The fixation on skin colour tells its own tale.
It is the promotion of this victimhood narrative, a dog-whistle that every person who looks foreign is benefiting from preferential treatment at your expense, which is doing so much of the heavy lifting in fuelling the surge in racism we have seen in recent months. As someone on the receiving end of this scapegoating, continually told I’m going to be deported, that I’m “only an MP because of DEI” or – worse still – repeatedly referred to online as the n-word, there is clearly a responsibility that we as parliamentarians must choose our words – and the narratives we seek to promote – carefully.
This role, almost like no other, carries with it a responsibility to hold the fabric of our society together. There are some new Members who would do well to be mindful of that.
Ben Obese-Jecty is Conservative MP for Huntingdon
