Most Britons Do Not Believe that Criticizing Minority Overrepresentation in Ads is Racist

Making sense of the Sarah Pochin affair

This week, British Reform Party MP Sarah Pochin agreed with a caller on a prominent phone-in show, opining that ‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people. It doesn’t reflect our society and I feel that your average white person, average white family, is not represented any more.’

At this, Pochin received a chorus of condemnations from the left of the political spectrum. Labour health secretary Wes Streeting called her remarks ‘a disgrace,’ adding that ‘I think it was racist and the deafening silence from her party leader [Nigel Farage] says it all.’ Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey called it ‘racism, pure and simple.’ David Lammy decried her remarks as ‘mean, nasty and racist.’ Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it ‘shocking racism.’ All called for the Tories to condemn her and for Reform to sack her.

Importantly, Tory politicians avoided criticizing Pochin as racist. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp was grilled by Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC, initially deflecting her question about whether Pochin’s remarks were racist by saying the public need to be able to discuss immigration. However, on Times Radio, he later qualified his remarks by saying, “She should not have said that in the way she said it, that was completely wrong and yes it was racist.”

Pochin also later apologized for her phrasing, averring that her comments were directed at woke advertisers who had gone ‘DEI mad.’ She was supported by party chairman Zia Yusuf, who argued that the misrepresentation of the British population’s racial makeup was a legitimate point for debate. Indeed, the context for her discussion on the Talk TV call-in show was a Channel 4 study which showed that black people, who form just 4 percent 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. As Laurie Wastell observed in the Spectator, When Pochin asked Streeting for his thoughts on Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar decrying the fact that 93 percent of Scottish officials were white, Wastell commented that ‘[Streeting] simpered that Sarwar’s identitarian rant was a “powerful point about a lack of representative leadership in Scotland”. As everyone knows, the “diversity” game the left loves to play is unashamedly two-tier: calling for fewer whites, good; calling for more whites, bad.’

The Study

Where are the British public on these vexed questions? To find out, I ran a quick survey on Prolific, a platform used mainly by academics, with a sample balanced between left and right, and between the sexes. These samples still skew toward the better educated and tech savvy, but they give a decent indication of where public sentiment lies.

The sample of 300 was randomly shown one of four statements (I have added highlighting here):

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,

They were then asked, ‘Is this a) racist, b) not racist, c) unsure. Response categories were rotated to prevent bias toward the first available answer.

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

However, when the question is phrased as whites being underrepresented, only 29 percent of people say such a comment is racist. Not only that, but a higher share of the public find Anas Sarwar/Hamza Yousaf-style comments on the overrepresentation of whites racist (32%) than people saying whites are underrepresented in ads (29%). Finally, virtually no one believes that pointing to the underrepresentation of black people in ads is racist (3%).

Opinion obviously divides on political lines on these questions. The relatively small sample makes it important to amalgamate responses, so the next chart shows results by vote intention for whether people think that being upset at blacks being overrepresented or whites being underrepresented in ads is racist. (Sample size per bar ranges from 18 to 25 apart from SNP/Plaid Cymru at 4.)

Combining the blacks overrepresented/whites underrepresented responses, I find that among left-of-centre parties a slight majority of people believe these sentiments are racist. For Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, it is merely 45-50 percent. Only Green voters are solidly of the belief that both remarks combined are racist. While all voters for Plaid Cymru and the SNP believe these positions are racist, bear in mind that just 4 respondents in the sample voted for these parties, so this could well be a blip.

Finally, those who do not intend to vote, or say they would vote for a minor party, lean toward the Reform position. Here it is worth saying that 8 in 10 of this group are nonvoters, who split evenly along ideological lines. The disengaged public is very much of the view that Pochin-style comments are not racist.

If we zero in on the question of whether a person who is upset at black overrepresention in advertisements is racist, grouping voters by self-identified political ideology, we find a 61-point gulf between left (81% racist) and right (20% racist), with centrists and nonvoters similar to the right, albeit with a larger share unsure. Sample size is 14-25 per ideology.

However, now consider how the results change when we alter ‘blacks overrepresented’ to ‘whites underrepresented’, which is effectively just the flipside of the same statement. While left-wing voters are still more exercised, the share calling this racist tumbles from 81 to 48 percent, and the partisan gap narrows.

When asked the Sarwar/Yousaf question about whether it is racist to be upset at white people being overrepresented, an important share of left party voters (33%) agree, which is similar to the proportion on the right. A 56 percent majority of nonvoters and other party voters say this is racist, though with a sample of 12 this reflects random noise in the draw from this population: a statistical analysis controlling for demographics shows no significant effect for none/other voters on this question.

Bottom line: more people think that being upset about too many white people in ads is racist than think a complaint about too few whites is racist, and there is no partisan divide on this question.

The spread of responses across the four versions of the question by party family appears in the figure below. The results show two things. First, that left voters are much more exercised by people being upset about black overrepresentation and white underrepresentation than right voters and nonvoters. Second, that 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. Finally, that left and right voters have similar views on the Sarwar/Yousaf stance of calling out the overrepresentation of whites – with 1 in 3 left-wing voters calling this racist.

Sarah Pochin’s comments caused a firestorm in the media, with the political left lining up to condemn her remarks as racist. These results suggest that she would have been better to phrase her remarks in a more temperate way, focusing on the underrepresentation of whites rather than the overrepresentation of ‘black and brown people’. Moreover, the fact that South Asians are not overrepresented the same way black people weakens her argument and makes her look anti-minority.

Yet, in practical terms, white underrepresentation and black overrepresentation are two sides of the same coin. In view of this, the fact that 81 percent of left voters believe it is racist to be upset about black overrepresentation while just 48 percent of them say the same about white underrepresentation is striking. Conservatives and centrists are similarly inconsistent, though more modestly.

Nevertheless, in another sense, public inconsistency is understandable: dislike of outgroups is actually a separate disposition from attachment to in-group. The former is racist, the latter is not, and this is an important distinction to draw. Pochin’s remarks could be read as being motivated by animus toward ‘black and brown people.’

On the other hand, we need to balance this with the principle of charity that her meaning, in the context of the wider conversation and her prior commentary, was to point out that the white majority is being underrepresented in advertising. This is a much more acceptable sentiment – only 29 percent of people in the survey think this is racist - and Pochin should have phrased her views this way.

Likewise, Anas Sarwar and Hamza Yousaf erred in focusing on white overrepresentation, a position which even a third of left-wing voters find racist, rather than black (or brown) under-representation, which almost nobody finds racist. In practical terms the two are the same, but the way they play on public sensibilities differs substantially.

In view of the fact that focusing on a group being overrepresented has the whiff of outgroup antipathy rather than in-group attachment, the public’s sensibility in both the Pochin and Sarwar/Yousaf cases is understandable. On this reading, Sarwar and Pochin are guilty of negligence, not criminality.

A further wrinkle in the data is blatant partisan inconsistency, especially on the left. 81 percent of left voters think a person being upset about black overrepresentation is racist, but just 33 percent say the same about someone being upset about white overrepresentation: a 48-point gap. For right voters, there is a 14-point gap the other way, with 20 percent calling Pochin-style sentiment racist as against 34 percent viewing Sarwar/Yousaf-type comments as racist.

Those on the left might justify their inconsistency on the basis of the critical race theory position that racism is ‘prejudice plus power’ and that nonwhites do not have power. Or they could claim that the history of white prejudice justifies their stance. But the implication of this analytically dubious set of propositions is that minorities cannot be racist while past wrongs justify present discrimination, views rejected by most Britons.

This episode has important implications for the cultural progressive beliefs which form the established moral-emotional regime in the high culture and elite institutions of western societies. As I wrote in my book Taboo (The Third Awokening in North America), race is the most sacred category in the woke trinity of race-sexuality-gender, hence those on the intellectual left have much greater difficulty consistently applying the principle of anti-racism than conservatives or centrists - who are less invested in this quasi-religious belief system.

The debate reveals the blind spots of left and right. Western societies were built for whites and thus whites are ‘normal’ in everyday life, which can confer modest advantages that the right tends to overlook. Some sensitivity around language describing minorities is justified, which Pochin failed to observe.

The left, which dominates the meaning-making institutions, is, likewise, unable to understand that whites are disadvantaged demographically - they are shrinking not growing, which induces malaise and anxiety. When it comes to identity recognition, they are not permitted to express their group interests or organize around them the way minorities are, giving way to frustration. Hence Sarwar-style accusations directed against whites come across as inflammatory.

Wes Streeting’s response to Pochin over Anas Sarwar’s comments - that Sarwar was pursuing social justice and thus Sarwar and Pochin’s remarks are incomparable, shows the myside bias that blinds most progressives and liberals, for whom ‘punching up not down’ is an obvious moral centre which should trump all other considerations.

The final aspect of the Pochin story is that forms part of a wider cultural struggle over the boundaries and power of progressive taboos in society. In Canada, for instance, criticizing immigration carried a stigma for decades until last year, but in Britain the taboo on discussing immigration and multiculturalism had already lost some force, becoming more contested and less radioactive in recent years.

Stigmas are black-and-white social punishments, not proportionate penalties linked to the severity and repeated nature of an offence. Danish anthropologist Agner Fog argues that culture wars in society take place whereby the proponents of taboos try to expand them through ‘regalization’ while the accused resist mission creep by trying to roll back the scope of taboos through what he calls ‘kalyptization’. Gays and youth subcultures are among those who successfully overturned prior stigmas.

This cultural battle is not adjudicated through jurisprudence and reason, but through emotion-laden accusations, declarations and punishments. If regalizers succeed in punishing and initiating cascades of mass opprobrium, the taboo expands. If they fail, it recedes.

The Pochin affair has resulted in a stalemate along partisan lines, weakening the societal consensus required to enforce taboos across the board. Reform and Tory politicians have refrained from calling Pochin a racist, with Zia Yusuf defending her as having a legitimate point - albeit phrased insensitively. Nigel Farage said the remarks were ‘ugly’ but that Pochin in fact was trying to talk about the legitimate issue of white underrepresentation in advertising, and will not be disciplined.

While the Tory Chris Philp ultimately did admit her remarks were racist, upholding taboo boundaries, the fact he resisted this on the BBC so strenuously represents a setback for progressive taboo-strengthening regalization - and movement in the direction of taboo-weakening kalyptization. The writ of progressive taboos no longer binds the right half of the political spectrum, though this would undoubtedly be different had Pochin expressed blatant racism.

These things seem trivial, yet they are central for the durability of the ‘vibe shift’, a newly unfolding post-progressive tendency in the high culture which is beginning to erode the sway of the most intrusive forms of post-1960s progressive public morality.