Image - Youtube (click to enlarge)
Nigel Farage has never been afraid to court controversy as the above poster shows. This anti-migrant poster, used by Farage in the EU referendum campaign, was reported to the police by Dave Prentis of the Unison Union, with a complaint that it incited racial hatred and breached UK race laws.
Farage first unveiled the controversial poster outside the EU’s headquarters in London. The photograph was licensed from Getty Images and shows migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, with the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text. Underneath the words "Breaking Point" are the words “the EU has failed us all”.
Farage deployed a fleet of vans emblazoned with the image to follow him around central London. UKIP said its vans showed a real picture of migrants entering Slovenia, a country that joined the EU in 2004 and had failed to control its border.
The poster appeared in major national newspapers including the Telegraph, the Daily Star, and the Daily Express.
A string of politicians from Nicola Sturgeon to Yvette Cooper condemned the poster. Bonnie Greer, the American playwright who once appeared on BBC Question Time with Nick Griffin, tweeted an image of the poster alongside a quote from the Nazi military chief Hermann Goering which said:
“All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked. Works the same way in any country”.The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon described the poster as “disgusting” while one of her MPs, Pete Wishard, also weighed in saying that a “vote for leave has pretty much become a vote for petty xenophobia and anti immigrant rhetoric”.
The author John O’Farrell added: “No white migrants then? The debate has sunk to a new low, with Farage exposed as the racist we always knew he was.”
Controversy over the poster had prompted Boris Johnson to distance the official leave campaign from UKIP.
The image was very similar to Nazi propaganda footage of migrants shown in a BBC documentary from 2005, although it's unlikely that Farage knew of the connection.
Screenshots from "Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution", six-part BBC documentary
The poster may have been controversial, but it's the defining image of the whole referendum campaign and it was a major factor in tipping the balance towards Leave.
