What’s Going On With Britain’s Woke Ads?

On Saturday, Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin lit a fire under Britain’s ad industry after telling TalkTV that she’s “driven mad” by the sheer number of non-white faces on TV screens.

After a call in, she told host Peter Cardwell: “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.”

She added: “It doesn’t reflect our society, and I feel that your average white person, average white family, is not represented any more.”

According to a recent major Channel 4 study, black people, who form just 4 % of the UK population, featured in 37% of ads in 2020, rising to 51% in 2022.

It said that 77% agree DEI Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is important in advertising, up from 72% in 2023.

“Woke” policies have been accused of heightening intergroup tensions, failing to boost overall performance, as forced demographic shifts often prioritize group quotas over competence.

Pochin’s remarks, which she apologised for any “offence caused,” sparked immediate backlash from the Labour government and campaign groups.

“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 said on X.

However according to Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham Eric Kaufmann writing in Unherd, the public is divided on the issue.

“According to this sample, 45% of Britons say it is racist to be upset at the overrepresentation of black people in advertisements, with 40% saying this is not racist and a further 15% unsure. On this phrasing, the public is evenly divided,” he said.

He adde that in practical terms, “white underrepresentation and black overrepresentation are largely two sides of the same coin.”

“Such debates over language are far from trivial, involving a battle over the cultural power of the progressive taboos which have defined Western public morality since the Sixties,” said Kaufmann.