Political discourse has been dominated recently by the row over Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s comments about demographics in television advertising. During a TalkTV call-in, Pochin said: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” What began as a complaint about media representation quickly escalated into a national argument about race and belonging.
Pochin’s phrasing was at best clumsy and at worst racially hostile. Nevertheless, the intensity of the backlash and the rapid escalation across the political class reveal a deeper fragility in Britain’s civic culture. This is no longer merely a dispute over representation. It is a symptom of a society where mutual trust between groups is eroding and where the worst motives are routinely assumed. A diverse nation can survive disagreement. It cannot survive mutual contempt.
One side views greater diversity in advertising as an unequivocal positive. It represents long-overdue recognition for minority groups and signals a modern, confident Britain in which everyone can belong. Others interpret what they see as overrepresentation as a form of cultural displacement. Some white Britons feel that the stories and faces that once reflected their world no longer do. In a rapidly changing society, the reassurance of familiarity on television should not be underestimated. These are not competing facts but clashing imaginaries: rival interpretations of who Britain is for, and who is allowed to appear at the centre of its story. In this environment, politics is treated as existential, where every disagreement feels like a threat to identity.
Taken in isolation, Sarah Pochin’s remark was clearly offensive and it was right that it was challenged. In a high-trust society, however, clumsy language invites correction rather than condemnation. She later apologised and clarified her stance, which does not excuse her poor phrasing, yet a basic civic grace would allow her broader point to be acknowledged rather than dismissed. Instead, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey accused her of racism, a serious charge with moral and political consequences. Her words became interpreted as proof of Reform’s hostility toward ethnic minorities. The shift from disagreement to moral panic illustrates a civic culture that increasingly assumes bad faith from those on the other side of the political divide.
Politics becomes antagonistic when every gain for one group is framed as a loss for another, creating a zero-sum framework with strict winners and losers. Both Labour and Reform have contributed to this sentiment. Reform leans on a populist narrative that casts British people as losing while foreigners are winning. Labour, meanwhile, routinely responds by escalating disagreements into accusations of racism, a move that is politically expedient yet civically corrosive. These approaches may have emotional appeal but they fuel notions of a demographic battleground without offering a pathway to reconciliation. The present dispute is a case in point. What could have been a fair and reasonable discussion about whether advertising reflects London’s demographics rather than wider Britain has instead mutated into a moral drama about racism and exclusion.
A multicultural democracy relies on interpersonal trust and civic patience. There must be a shared understanding that, despite differing views on identity, economics and culture, most people are working toward the common good. At present, this is largely absent from British politics. When suspicion dominates, politics becomes a perpetual state of war. The risk is that we lose the ability to negotiate changes in identity without fracturing our society, which will leave us with an electorate that is increasingly ungovernable. The challenge is to recover a civic ethos where disagreement is normal. Without this, future controversies will be even more destructive.
[Further reading: Danny Kruger’s war on Whitehall]
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