Streeting blasts Farage over his MP's 'racist' comment

Wes Streeting has claimed Nigel Farage's “deafening silence” over the “racist” remarks made by his fellow Reform MP Sarah Pochin “says it all”.

- DAVID MADDOX

The health secretary went on the attack after Ms Pochin told Talk TV that “it drives me mad seeing adverts full of black and Asian people”.

Ms Pochin has since apologised, but Mr Streeting told Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC yesterday: “She’s only sorry that she’s been called out and she said the quiet bit out loud... The only way we are going to defeat this racism is to call it out and confront it for what it is.”

The shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, refused three times on the same programme to describe Ms Pochin as racist when pressed on the issue. Last week, his fellow Tory MP Katie Lam suggested that legal migrants should be deported.

Mr Streeting told of how on Friday he had been in a school in his Ilford North constituency, talking to teenage boys about their experience of racism in London, “one of the most diverse cities on earth”.

“What they are describing, and what we have seen on our streets in recent weeks and months, is a return of 1970s, 1980s-style racism that I thought we had left in the history books.”