It is with some regret that Rats in a Sack must report that Sarah Pochin – even with quite the competition, perhaps Reform’s maddest MP – has been speaking her brains again.
Pochin, the MP for Runcorn and Helsby and rumoured to be Nigel Farage’s pick for justice secretary in a Reform government, does a weekly Facebook Live for her constituents in which she answers questions, gives updates on news and spouts wild and completely unfounded conspiracy theories.
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).
And last week she used her platform to announce a new Reform policy – the banning of pencils from polling stations to prevent clerks from rubbing out votes for Reform (“We’re gonna put a rule down, make a law that says no polling stations should have pencils in them”).
Now Pochin has gone further – by using her Facebook Live to promote a completely invented statistic about the amount of new housing stock reserved for foreign nationals, migrants and asylum seekers.
“I did hear this week a really disturbing fact that 50 per cent of all new houses being built in this country will go to foreign nationals, to migrants, asylum-seeking nationals,” she told her viewers. “What a frightening statistic.
“And of course if you stop illegal asylum seekers coming in, then you don’t need to build so many houses. And you also don’t need to build houses on things like the Green Belt, which of course I’m so passionate about protecting.”
It seems Pochin was relying on a report from the Daily Express last month which has since been comprehensively debunked. That report, “EXPOSED: Huge number of Labour’s new homes wiped out by immigration demand”, was written by Aaron Newbury who, as Rats in a Sack has reported more than once, was until very recently a full-time press officer for the Conservative Party before being hired by the Express despite having no reporting experience.
That report claimed that “damning new figures” had shown that almost half of new homes built since Labour took power had been cancelled out by the housing demand created by net migration. But the figures were a calculation by the Conservative Party and were debunked by the BBC radio show More or Less.
All the Conservatives had done was take the number of new homes built under Keir Starmer’s government and the net increase in migration during the same period, then assumed that every single one arriving was given one of these houses, and that the situation would continue into the future – a meaningless back-of-a-fag packet calculation.
Chuck in the fact that only a small percentage of the new builds are social housing, meaning that the government isn’t building them, can’t decide who to give them to, and anybody coming into the UK would have to compete for them on the open market, and it’s clearly total bollocks. Still, won’t stop Pochin using it to stir up hatred on her weekly Lives!
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