“I think what she said was a disgrace. I think it was racist.” Health Secretary Wes Streeting didn’t mince his words on Sunday 26 October, accusing Reform UK’s Runcorn and Helsby MP Sarah Pochin of crossing a line and criticising Nigel Farage’s “deafening silence” over the row. He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that Britain must call out racism “and confront it for what it is.”

The backlash follows Pochin’s appearance on TalkTV, where she agreed with a caller and said it “drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people,” adding that “your average white person, average white family is not represented anymore.” She blamed the “woke liberati” in the “arty‑farty world” and said “it might be fine inside the M25, but it’s definitely not representative of the rest of the country.”

Pochin later apologised, saying her remarks were “phrased poorly” and insisting she intended to argue that UK advertising had gone “DEI mad” and was “unrepresentative of British society.” She cited Channel 4’s ‘Mirror on the Industry’ audit showing the share of adverts featuring Black people rose from 37% in 2020 to around 51% by 2022 and remained near that level.

Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf said Pochin was “right to apologise” and called her a “lovely person,” but argued she had raised “a very valid point we must be able to talk about” regarding representation in adverts. He urged people to consider the full context of the exchange.

Opposition parties piled in. The Liberal Democrats urged Farage to withdraw the whip from Pochin, with Eastbourne MP Josh Babarinde saying Reform should “act pretty quickly.” Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp declined to call the remarks racist, saying it wasn’t language he would use.

So how does this land locally? The constituency spans Halton and Cheshire West. According to the 2021 Census, Halton is 96.5% White, with 0.4% identifying as Black and 1.1% as Asian. In neighbouring Cheshire West and Chester, 95.3% identify as White, 0.6% as Black and 2.0% as Asian.

National advertising, though, isn’t cast to mirror one town’s census. Channel 4’s multi‑year audit analysed thousands of top UK TV adverts and found both progress and gaps: while the share of ads featuring Black people rose after 2020, disabled people appear in just 4% of adverts and over‑70s in around 2%, despite much higher population shares.

Streeting, speaking from London, framed the issue as part of a wider return to “1970s and 1980s‑style racism” and repeated his criticism of Farage’s lack of public comment. His argument was stark: the Union flag belongs to everyone who built the country, not just to those who look a certain way.

Runcorn and Helsby only sent Pochin to Westminster in May after a knife‑edge by‑election decided by six votes following Mike Amesbury’s resignation. It was a shock result in a seat long seen as safe for Labour, and it put Reform’s first North West MP under a brighter national spotlight.

Community groups across Cheshire say they’ll keep offering support to anyone facing discrimination. The Cheshire, Halton & Warrington Race & Equality Centre’s Unity Centre in Chester, for example, provides advice, ESOL classes and a hub for local residents who need help or want to volunteer. Whatever the Westminster row, that day‑to‑day work continues.