Starmer Slams Reform Rhetoric After MP Stands By Ads Comment

Keir Starmer has accused Reform UK of promoting a “racist rhetoric” after one of its MPs went on a controversial rant over the race of people used in adverts last year.

Sarah Pochin told Talk TV in October that it “drives me mad when I see adverts full of Black people, full of Asian people, who are anything other than white”.

The MP for Runcorn and Helsby blamed the “woke liberati that goes on inside the arty-farty world”.

She later responded to the backlash by saying her comments were “phrased poorly,” and that she “unreservedly apologise[s] for any offence caused”.

However, Pochin added: “The point I was making is that many British TV adverts have gone DEI mad and are now unrepresentative of British society as a whole. This is not an attack on any group but an observation about balance and fairness in how our country is portrayed on screen.”

She added this week that her comments were clumsy but “absolutely right”.

The prime minister condemned her remarks in a new interview, telling the Mirror: “Yet again our country’s discourse is being poisoned and polluted by the racist rhetoric coming from Reform – pitting communities against one another and sowing division to suit their own ends.

“They should be apologising, not doubling down.”

Starmer also attacked Reform over its candidate for the upcoming by-election, Gorton and Denton.

The right-wing party has put forward Matt Goodwin, who has received support from the far-right extremist Tommy Robinson and who has previously called for “an immediate ban on all migration from predominantly Islamic nations”.

The prime minister said: “You only have to look at the toxicity flowing from their candidate for Gorton and Denton to know what they are about – dangerous ideas that pull at the fabric of who we are in Britain.

“They don’t have solutions to the challenges we face as as country. All they can offer is a smokescreen of hate and division.”

The prime minister said Britain left that kind of politics “in the 1980s”, and that he rejects it “completely and utterly”.

“My Labour government will always choose the other path – the one that celebrates our reasonable, tolerant and diverse country,” Starmer said. “That is the country I love and that is the country I am fighting for.”

The interview comes after the most tumultuous week of this Labour government yet, as the prime minister tries to hang onto his premiership in the wake of the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Labour Party chair Anna Turley also slammed Pochin, saying in a statement: “It is utterly grotesque that Nigel Farage tolerates this flagrant racism in Reform.

“Sarah Pochin – Reform’s last by-election candidate – has followed Farage’s lead in peddling toxic division in our communities. If Reform had any shame whatsoever, they would have dealt with these vile remarks long ago.

“Instead, Reform are offering more of the same with their latest extreme by-election candidate Matthew Goodwin, who is endorsed by the far-right thug Tommy Robinson.”

Pochin reignited the debate around her remarks this week when she was asked if she accepted some people saw her comments as racist.

She told the Daily T podcast: “Those who choose to perceive it that way will do so, those who have nothing else to throw at me because I would like to think I represent the politics of common sense and represent the average person in this country.

“Those comments were misinterpreted entirely, I accept it was clumsy speech but what I said is absolutely right.

“I said, the British advertising industry has 52% or 56% – I can’t quite remember what the figure is – of ethnic minority actors represented in the adverts, and yet the population is 4%, that is not a reflection of our population.”

Pochin also referred to a Channel 4 survey which noted 51% of adverts in 2024 featured Black people.

Her party leader Nigel Farage described Pochin’s remarks as “ugly” in October, but insisted the intention was not racist and rejected calls for her to be punished.