Reform UK’s latest foray into law and order politics strips bare the creeping politics of patriarchal restoration. When Sarah Pochin, the party’s justice spokesperson, said she “never feels comfortable seeing two female officers together” and would “much rather see a great big strapping male police officer with a female,” she wasn’t making an offhand comment. She was sketching the contours of a worldview in which women are, by default, second-class citizens, less capable, less commanding, less visible unless accompanied by male authority.
This is not simply sexism in the abstract. It is plan. Pochin’s remarks (and Farage’s broader blueprint for authoritarian policing) are part of a reactionary project to reimpose rigid hierarchies: gendered, racialised, class-bound. Women, in this vision, can exist only in subordinate or sentimentalised roles, relegated to “sensitive” tasks, deemed too “vulnerable” for frontline work, symbolic rather than authoritative. This is not about safety or effectiveness. It’s about restoring a lost order, one in which power is visibly male.
As under Trump, so under Farage. We have seen this playbook before: a chauvinist politics that cloaks itself in populism, performs strength while undermining equality, and speaks of “protecting women” only to strip them of agency. Just as Trump’s America rolled back reproductive rights and stacked institutions with men loyal to patriarchal dogma, Reform UK reveals its hand: a Britain where female police officers need male chaperones, where power is masculinised and “law and order” becomes a euphemism for obedience to traditional hierarchies.
