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Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s comments about adverts were ‘racist’, Wes Streeting says

The Liberal Democrats have also called on Farage to suspend Pochin from the party.

The row erupted after Pochin said she agreed with a caller on TalkTV who complained about the “demographics” of advertising.

Pochin said the viewer was “absolutely right” and “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”.

She said “it doesn’t reflect our society” and “your average white person, average white family” is not “represented anymore”.

Pochin blamed the situation on the “woke liberati” in the “arty-farty world”.

“It might be fine inside the M25, but it’s definitely not representative of the rest of the country,” she said.

In a social media post later on Saturday, Pochin said her comments “were phrased poorly and I unreservedly apologise for any offence caused, which was not my intention”.

She said she was intending to say the advertising industry had gone “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] mad” and were now “unrepresentative of British society as a whole”.

In her statement, Pochin cited a Channel 4 study which found that the proportion of adverts featuring black people jumped after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, from 37% in 2020 to 51% in 2022.

“Representation should reflect the diversity of modern Britain, but it should also be proportionate and inclusive of everyone,” she said.

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