A tweet from actor Reece Dinsdale this week asked "where does 'wrong and ugly' end and racist begin"? This was inspired by the dreadful viral clip of Reform UK Ltd MP Sarah Pochin, responding to a caller on one of those seldom watched new rolling TV news hannels, who was bemoaning the state of telly adverts.
Specifically, she said the Talk TV viewer was "absolutely right" when complaining about the "demographics" of advertising, and "it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people". She claimed "your average white person" is "not represented anymore", in a discussion between a white TV host and a white MP that's presumably now been seen by far more people than the original show when it aired.
Reform UK's leader Nigel Farage is being touted by some commentators as our next Prime Minister following a string of soaraway opinion poll leads, even though the next general election is most likely several years away. Whilst I don't think there should even be a debate about whether being cross about seeing someone black or Asian on a supermarket advert is racist, he shied away from calling a spade a spade, instead saying the way Sarah Pochin worded her comments was "wrong and ugly". Wrong and ugly? I obviously write this from a position of white privilege, where I have never had to worry about the colour of my skin being an issue, but what utterly disingenious poppycock.
I'm convinced that a lot of those who voted for Brexit did so because they wanted to see fewer brown and black faces on the tills at Sainsbury's, and remember hearing a caller say as much to LBC's mid-morning host James O'Brien back in 2017 (he claimed to have counted only one white cashier at the tills, and raised it with the store's manager, such was the level of his concern). This is pure racism. As is the recent statement by Robert Jenrick about spending 90 minutes in a place where he didn't see another white face.
What sort of person watches telly ads and keeps a tally of the ethnic makeup of those selling us stuff? It's a deeply weird prism through which to view the world. I just can't fathom it. The recent Yaxley-Lennon rally in London was another depressing occasion, full of those with so-called 'legitimate concerns' and stoked up by an appearance by Elon Musk darkly hinting at violence on its way to our streets. Verbal and physical attacks on NHS nurses are on the rise, flags have become a weapon of division, and I find it all incredibly bleak and depressing.
If we allow sentiments like Pochin's to pass unchallenged, what comes next? What do some of these characters say at dinner parties, when the cameras are not rolling, if this is the bit they are willing to say out loud? I was glad to see Sir Keir Starmer calling out the comments as racist, but wonder how he allowed his famous 'island of strangers' speech to pass through quality checking before he later disowned it.
I can't begin to imagine how it must feel to not belong in a country where you were born, have always lived, and have as much right as anyone else to call home. Is that really the kind of place we want the UK to be? Nobody is saying there isn't a debate to be had about levels of immigration, but those risking their lives arriving on small boats make up a tiny proportion of the total numbers (roughly 5%, according to a recent count), yet take up the majority of the shouty red top front pages. Open up more legal routes, process claims more quickly, and perhaps numbers would drop.
Seeing people with different ethnicities selling baked beans and cars on telly ads is a really strange thing to get foamed up about. Not calling out obvious racism is more dangerous still. I don't say this lightly, but there have been echoes of the 1930s in some of the campaign posters I've seen, and I do worry about the path we are heading down. Ads with black and brown faces are not 'woke', and representing different ethnicities is not something that should upset anyone. Anyone who's spent time on 'X' recently will have seen it's largely become an echo chamber for far-right bots fanning the flames of division, and I worry that real life is heading the same way. I hope not.
Alex Cann's weekly blog - 9th January
