The outrage that greeted Sarah Pochin’s comments about the number of black and Asian faces in television adverts has become its own kind of morality play. She was condemned and branded insensitive. Yet, behind the fury lies a deeper, more uncomfortable question: whilst her phrasing was clumsy, was there truth behind what she said?

I believe there was. And it is high time we acknowledged the inconvenient reality of a prejudice that has crept into our national life under the banner of progress: anti-white racism.

All racism is wrong. Every form of it. To judge, favour or punish a person on the basis of skin colour is not merely unjust, it is primitive. The promise of a civilised, meritocratic society was that we would move beyond such obsessions. Race, we were told, would one day matter no more than eye colour. Yet that vision is now receding, replaced by a new orthodoxy that tolerates – indeed, encourages – racial double standards, provided the targets are white.

From the casual to the institutional, this inversion of prejudice has taken root in Britain. And those who point it out are vilified.

Consider the grooming gang scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere. They are among the most shameful episodes of modern British life. The perpetrators, predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, preyed on vulnerable white girls. The crimes were horrific, the cover-up still more so. Police officers, councillors and social workers turned a blind eye for fear of being called racist. The victims were of the “wrong” background, the perpetrators part of a “sensitive” community. The result was a grotesque moral cowardice: an institutional decision that some victims mattered less than others because of their race.

Or take the creeping bureaucratic racism of the so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” agenda; Oxford University’s policies, which appear to relax entry criteria for black students; the RAF’s decision to halt recruitment of white men in pursuit of diversity targets; public bodies – from the NHS to the Bank of England – openly advertising roles restricted to “Black, Asian and Global Majority” applicants. If this were reversed, if those job adverts excluded ethnic minorities, the outrage would be volcanic. Yet when discrimination is directed against white Britons, it is repackaged as progress.

Even the Sentencing Council recently considered guidelines that would have allowed courts to hand down lighter sentences to offenders from ethnic minorities – a proposal so extraordinary that Robert Jenrick’s intervention was required to force a humiliating U-turn by the Government. The mere fact that such an idea reached the threshold of implementation tells us how far the logic of “equality” has gone.

This isn’t equality. It’s the re-racialisation of public life – a regression masquerading as enlightenment. It rewards grievance, penalises achievement and corrodes trust in institutions that once claimed to serve everyone impartially. And no way is it inclusive: if your face doesn’t fit the current trend, you’re not invited.

And what of those who dare to object? They are met with hysteria by the centre and the Left. To question this new orthodoxy is to invite the familiar litany of slurs: “racist”, “Nazi”, “far-right”. These words have become less an argument than a bludgeon, wielded to silence debate. So overused now is the attack of “racist” that it has become meaningless; a kind of political tinnitus that drowns out serious discussion.

The tactic has not worked with the electorate. It didn’t stop Brexit or Reform’s current popularity. But it has been devastating in other ways. It has cowed politicians, especially Conservatives, into paralysis. It is why the last government, despite its majority and its mandate, failed to repeal or even reform the Equality Act, a Blairite relic that turbocharged the bureaucracy of identity politics. It is why grooming gangs went largely unpunished (and those of us who tried were branded Islamophobic), why woke spiralled out of control (some Tory MPs actually confessed to being guilty of “white privilege” and took the knee) and why so many institutions continue to prioritise optics over competence.

Those of us on the Right cannot afford to hide. The British people, who are sensible, fair-minded and instinctively tolerant, know that something has gone badly wrong. They can see the double standards. They feel the injustice. What they need are leaders unafraid to name it.

The future of our country will be shaped not by those who shout “racist” the loudest, but by those willing to defend the principles that built modern Britain: fairness, merit and equality before the law. To stand for those values today requires courage, because it means swimming against the tide of a new orthodoxy. We must be brave enough to say what millions quietly believe: that prejudice is prejudice, no matter whom it targets.

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