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The Guardian // Politics

It's the noblest battle of our new free-speech age: Sarah Pochin's anti-woke couch crusade | Marina Hyde

Tuesday 28th October 2025, 1:24PM

The Reform MP was driven ‘mad’ by the number of black and Asian people on the telly. What totally settled non-issue will her party tackle next?Does it matter what colour the people in a sofa advert are? I can’t help feeling it doesn’t. Certainly, after next month’s budget, our political class might find it has more pressing concerns than skin pigment in fictional families convened to flog you something comfy in chenille. In fact, if some of the even bigger global financial storm clouds on the horizon end up bursting, we might well end up thinking it doesn’t even meaningfully matter which big house/two slightly smaller houses Prince Andrew lives in. Impossible to conceive of in the current news vortex. And yet: a possibility.Either way, this week we are talking about Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s turn in a TalkTV phone-in, where she responded to a caller’s gambit on advertising “demographics”. Declaring the caller was “absolutely right”, Pochin explained that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people”. Mad? Listen, she said it. Contrary to initial positive assessments of Sarah’s talents when she was elected, she is starting to come across as an armchair short of a three-piece suite. But on reflection, I think the mad she is talking about is the angry kind. The kind where if you see another non-white face in a 15-second spot for a product you don’t need and are under precisely zero obligation to buy, you will literally lose your mind.Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnistA year in Westminster: on Tuesday 2 December, join John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar as they look back at another extraordinary year, with special guests, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets

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