On Saturday, Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin ignited a firestorm when she said on TalkTV that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” She added: “It doesn’t reflect our society, and I feel that your average white person, average white family, is not represented any more.”

Unsurprisingly, Pochin received a chorus of condemnations from the political Left in response. She later apologized for her phrasing, averring that her comments were directed at advertisers who had gone “DEI mad”. She was then backed by Reform’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, who argued that the misrepresentation of the British population’s racial makeup was a legitimate point for debate. The context for her discussion on TalkTV was a Channel 4 study which showed that black people, who form just 4% of the UK population, featured in 37% of ads in 2020, rising to 51% in 2022.

Pochin later went on the offensive on social media, questioning Labour’s double standards for failing to rebuke Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar when he decried the fact that 93% of Scottish officials are white.

But where are the British public on these questions? To find out, I ran a small survey on Prolific, a platform used mainly by academics, with a sample balanced between those on the Left and Right, and between the sexes. The sample of 300 was randomly shown one of four statements and asked whether each was racist or not:

1. If someone says they are upset because black people are overrepresented in advertisements
2. If someone says they are upset because white people are overrepresented in advertisements
3. If someone says they are upset because black people are underrepresented in advertisements
4. If someone says they are upset because white people are underrepresented in advertisements

According to this sample, 45% of Britons say it is racist to be upset at the overrepresentation of black people in advertisements, with 40% saying this is not racist and a further 15% unsure. On this phrasing, the public is evenly divided.

However, when the question is framed around white people being underrepresented, only 29% of respondents say such a comment is racist. What’s more, a higher share of the public find Sarwar-style comments on the overrepresentation of whites racist (32%) than people saying whites are underrepresented in ads (29%). Finally, almost no one believes that pointing to the underrepresentation of black people in ads is racist (3%).

Britons are divided over whether it’s racist to highlight black overrepresentation in ads

Is it racist to be upset about the following in ads?

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Opinion on these questions starkly divides along political lines, with non-voters more often taking a similar view to Right-wing voters. Seven in 10 of those who vote for Left-wing parties think Pochin-style comments on black overrepresentation are racist, but only one in three say the same of Sarwar-type sentiments. For voters on the Right, there is a 14-point gap the other way, with 20% calling sentiments like Pochin’s racist; meanwhile, 34% view Sarwar-type comments as racist.

At the same time, all voters are more likely to think that worrying about a group being overrepresented in ads is racist than worrying about a group being underrepresented. Additionally, respondents across the spectrum have similar views on the Sarwar stance of calling out the overrepresentation of white people — with one in three Left-wing voters viewing this as racist.

In practical terms, white underrepresentation and black overrepresentation are largely two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, in another sense, the public’s inconsistency is understandable: dislike of out-groups is a separate issue from attachment to the in-group. While Pochin’s remarks could be read as being motivated by animus toward “black and brown people”, we should balance this with the charitable interpretation that her likely meaning, in the wider context, was to say that the white majority is underrepresented in advertising. This is a much more acceptable sentiment — only 29% of respondents in the survey think it’s racist — and Pochin should have phrased her views this way.

Such debates over language are far from trivial, involving a battle over the cultural power of the progressive taboos which have defined Western public morality since the Sixties. Whether the “vibe shift” toward a post-progressive dispensation in the high culture endures depends very much on the outcome of these public appeals and accusations.

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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