The Reform MP who unwittingly criticised her own party

In the future, sociologists may wish to study the livestreams of Sarah Pochin, Reform’s MP for Runcorn and Helsby, for an insight into a mind long since detached from reality. She offers a weekly video Q&A on her Facebook page, and the latest was truly remarkable. 

First off, she ranted about the Scouts: 
“There’s a new badge and you earn it if you have spent time learning about Islam and how to engage with and be welcoming to anyone from that religion. I kid you not. There is now a Scout’s badge that you can earn by learning about Islam. That is frightening. And it should not be happening in our country.”

She even told parents to “be wary” if their kids were in the Scouts or Brownies. “You just be careful that they’re not doing some kind of Islamo-badge thing,” she said. “Unbelievable.”

In the same video, Pochin decried a new government definition of anti-Muslim hostility on the grounds that there is not a similar one for Jews (there very much is) and that we will now longer be able to “criticise in any way the religion of Islam” (also untrue).

In the climax of her livestream, she criticised a Labour initiative to pay failed asylum seekers £40,000 to leave the country. “No way,” Pochin said. “Absolute disgrace. And you know what, they’re lauding it as some sort of fantastic policy. It’s so upsetting. Absolute nonsense. What are we doing?”

Pochin said this would never happen under a Reform government. Except it totally would! Nigel Farage gave an interview last year in which he said he would pay £2,500 to immigrants willing to leave the UK. It’s a much smaller figure, but nonetheless comparable. “And I think quite a few might take that option,” he said.

Regular readers will know Pochin’s unfortunate track record. She has conspiratorially said digital ID cards would stop people buying airline tickets and falsely claimed that Wales is trying to ban dogwalkers to appease foreigners. She praised Trump for threatening to annex Greenland. And she used her first PMQs appearance to call for a ban on the burqa!

When she was elected last year, Reform’s leaders like Zia Yusuf said he was “extremely glad” that she won, and would be “a great MP for Runcorn”. Great for who?

And in other news…

“Chlorinated chicken” might be one of those phrases that yanks you, like an unwelcome bite of Proust’s madeleine, back to the days of Brexit and the prospect of grotesque American meat flooding British markets. 

US poultry is washed with chlorine to remove bacteria because their chickens have short, sad lives in cramped and dirty cages.

Chlorine washing is banned in the UK (and the EU). 

Nigel Farage has repeatedly said that chlorinated chicken isn’t a big deal, saying bags of supermarket salad are washed in chlorine. But there’s no such thing as cage-reared salad.

His latest foray into the topic came in Farmer’s Weekly, where he said: “The prospect of chlorinated chicken is way down the road. It’s not going to happen.” Which sounded a little like he was saying not to be concerned about it. 

Pressed on the topic, he did, however, say that a Reform government would accept American imports of chlorinated chicken. “If it’s labelled properly. Yes. You’ve got to label stuff properly,” he said.

So that’s OK then!

⛺ Unhappy campers

There was outrage last May, when Reform’s newly elected Greater Lincolnshire Mayor suggested that asylum seekers should be housed in tents. But she’s not the only one associated with the party who seems to think that way. We’ve found that Billy Greening — one of Suella Braverman’s parliamentary staffers — wrote on X in August 2025 that asylum seekers “should get tents & marquees”. We contacted Braverman’s office for comment and, while we didn’t get a response, Greening made his X account private.

👍 Great job 

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, at a press conference this week, praised George Finch, the teenager in charge of Warwickshire County Council. “George is doing a great job,” Tice gushed. How great a job? Well, last year the 19-year-old Finch risked jeopardising legal proceedings against two men accused of rape by revealing their immigration status. In response, the council had to hire a law firm called Anthony Collins to conduct an external investigation into Finch’s comments. According to council records reviewed by HOPE not hate, Anthony Collins has billed the council for £14,709. “Introduce fiscal responsibility to Warwickshire,” said one of Reform’s election leaflets last year. Finch also narrowly survived a vote of no confidence this week. Great job!

High agency person #1

Zia Yusuf, the Reform bigshot, once bragged: “We’re pretty high agency people.” This will come as news to the good people of Doncaster. There, Reform’s group leader Craig Ward wasn’t just absent for a city council meeting about the local airport, but he later admitted he signed off on the agenda without even reading it. Ward said this was “an error in judgement”. His own deputy leader, Jason Charity, has criticised him over a “potential governance concern” for approving a motion via WhatsApp. High agency indeed!

High agency person #2

Ivan Dabbs is one of Reform’s councillors in West Northamptonshire, and he has a reputation for unedifying social media behaviour. Dabbs said he would vote for the serial criminal Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and has shared posts by the white nationalist party Britain First and its co-leader Paul Golding. On X, Dabbs has lately spent his afternoons and evenings responding to pictures of women. “Stunning,” he wrote under one. “My next wife,” he said under another. Perhaps the most depressing thing about Dabbs’s interactions with these women — aside from the fact that some of them occur in working hours, around 4pm — is that all the pictures are generated by AI.