The Facebook Live video appearances of Reform MP and Rats in a Sack favourite Sarah Pochin are always quite something, so it’s odd we’ve only just unearthed a particularly bonkers one on the day of the English local elections earlier this month.
Pochin, MP for Runcorn and Helsby, hosts weekly live sessions on Meta’s platform where the crackpot conspiracy theorist delivers a half-hour rant before taking questions from viewers, handily written out for her on post-it notes.
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Previously, she has praised Donald Trump for threatening to annex Greenland, claimed digital ID cards would stop people buying airline tickets and falsely reported that Wales was banning dog walking to appease foreigners. Earlier this year, she also warned her constituents that the Scouts had introduced “some kind of Islamo-badge thing”, saying: “That is frightening. And it should not be happening in our country” (they hadn’t it, it wasn’t and it isn’t).
Now it has emerged that, on the day of the local elections, she had urged followers to take pens with them into the voting booth, as those manning polling stations – non-aligned clerks doing a thankless job for long hours – would otherwise rub out votes for Reform cast with a pencil!
“This is so important, guys”, Pochin said, waving her pen. “I think – and I tell you what, when we’re in government, we’re gonna put a rule down, make a law that says no polling stations should have pencils in them. They should all have pens.
“And it’s very important so that your vote cannot be – cannot be! – changed in any way. Use a pen, guys. Take your own pen to the polling stations. Because they still have pencils in them. And do you know what? It’s really interesting, this one. My eldest son, who lives on Anglesey, rang me this morning. He’d just been to vote and it was about half past seven, and he said ‘Mum, they’ve still got pencils in the polling stations’, ‘cause obviously my kids are used to me going on about things like this.
“He said, ‘Is that legal? I told them it wasn’t legal’. I said to him ‘sadly, I think it is still legal’, but, you know, he’s absolutely right. Do not use a pencil, use a pen. Because then there’s no way that any rubbing-out can go on, let’s just leave it at that.”
This isn’t new of course – ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum, there were calls across social media for Leave backers to take pens to the polls to stop George Soros and Big Eraser from annulling their votes for independence. Except then, of course, it was from Twitter users with handles like @perfidiousalbion1966, and not an actual Member of Parliament with a fancy of being in Cabinet after the next general election.
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