DURING an interview with Peter Cardwell on TalkTV last Tuesday, recently elected Reform MP Sarah Pochin said what anyone with eyes – and a mind not clouded by ideology – can see.
‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Cardwell teased. ‘It doesn’t reflect society,’ Pochin retorted, ‘and I feel, you know, your average white person, the average white family is not represented any more. How many times do you look at a TV advert and you think there is not a single white person in it. It is something that happens because, I believe, of the woke liberati[sic] that goes on inside, you know, this sort of like arty-farty world,’ she concluded, rather laboriously.
When aliens eventually visit this overpopulated planet, they will surely misjudge its demographics if they rely on the supposed proportionality widely displayed in advertising and the entertainment industry. Pochin, in her own fractured way, denounced the demagoguery and opportunism practised by state elites and their ideological apparatuses all down the line.
Yet the true scandal, unnoticed by the chattering classes, came earlier. Minutes before, Cardwell had passed on a viewer’s question, an apparently innocent query: ‘Is Reform UK a capitalist party or a socialist one?’ Pochin didn’t answer straight away. She skirted the issue as if uncomfortable, offering instead a few convoluted, meandering sentences of gibberish. When Cardwell pressed: ‘Why don’t you say you are a capitalist and not a socialist?’ she produced an answer that would have made the ten Attic orators blush: ‘It’s a bit of both.’
Why didn’t she say: ‘My party is capitalist to the core, unreservedly and without question’? Why didn’t she say that Reform UK possesses not a single socialist gene in its DNA? Does she feel ashamed to declare she belongs to a capitalist party? Is Reform UK a secret socialist brotherhood? Must we believe she belongs to an organisation as infiltrated by socialists as the anarchist council in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday was by Scotland Yard? Or does she suffer from the affliction that seems to plague members of pro-market parties, the terror of being smeared by the left? Do right-wingers conceal a secret fear of what leftists might say about their opinions?
A couple of days later worse began and bad remained behind. During a press conference Nigel Farage had the opportunity to elaborate on Pochin’s monumental blunder – the real one. However, instead of addressing the main issue he decided to talk about the imaginary one, created by Big Media and the league of collectivists in their desperate quest for clicks and votes. Amazingly, Farage chose to play along with gossip town and remained silent on whether his party is capitalist or socialist – a matter of strategic importance sparked by one of Reform’s more visible MPs. Worse still, he expressed remorse for Pochin’s comments in a demagogic concession of the first order. ‘I understand the basic point but the way she put it, the way she worded it, was wrong and was ugly,’ he said as if in cahoots with Sir Keir Starmer who had earlier called Pochin’s remarks ‘shocking racism’ and ‘the sort of thing that’ll tear our country apart’. Is Farage also afraid of what Left & Media would say if he doesn’t comply with their instruction manual on race and gender?
Sarah Pochin’s reaction – and Farage’s tepid, outrageous response – leave only doubts. If Reform’s main voices cannot say publicly and categorically whether the party is capitalist or socialist, the situation is far more serious than it seems. A party that cannot name its creed has already begun to lose it.
