Breaking Point (UKIP poster)

Last updated

UKIP Breaking Point poster UKIP Breaking Point poster 2016.png
UKIP Breaking Point poster

Breaking Point was a poster released on 16 June 2016, during the final week of campaigning before the Brexit referendum. The poster was released by Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party and depicted a photograph of Syrian refugees near the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, with the caption "breaking point" and "the EU has failed us all".

Contents

Part of a £100,000 campaign from Family Advertising Ltd, an advertising firm based in Edinburgh, The poster was denounced by left- and right-wing politicians, [1] and several media outlets highlighted the poster's similarity to propaganda in Nazi Germany. [2] The same photograph was later used by the Hungarian Fidesz party in another poster during the build up to the 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election.

Poster design and unveiling

The photograph, which takes up the entire billboard, [3] was taken in October 2015 near the Croatia-Slovenia border by Getty Images photographer Jeff Mitchell, [4] [3] and depicts a large group of predominantly adult male Syrian and Afghan refugees, [3] almost all of whom had dark skin, [2] who were being taken to the Brežice refugee camp, escorted by Slovenian police. [3] There is one prominent white person visible in the original photograph; this person is covered by a box of text on the poster. [4] [1] In the photo, the people follow a path between two fields from its top left to its central foreground. [3] UKIP purchased a commercial licence from Getty Images to use the image. [3]

The photograph is captioned with the words "breaking point" in large red block capitals, above "the EU has failed us all" in smaller white text. It also features a lower bar with the text "we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders", [4] [3] [1] with a white box with the text "leave the European Union on 23 June" and a cross in a box in the bottom right corner. [1]

Nigel Farage, then leader of the UK Independence Party, unveiled the poster in June 2016 in Westminster, [1] during the final week before the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. [4] It was placed to take up an entire side of a Leave.EU campaign van. [1]

Reactions

Immediate reactions

The poster was condemned by politicians campaigning against Brexit. Then Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon stated that it was "disgusting", and Labour Party MP Yvette Cooper said "just when you thought leave campaigners couldn’t stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way." The Green Party's Caroline Lucas said that "using the innocent victims of a human tragedy for political propaganda is utterly disgusting. Farage is engaging in the politics of the gutter." Dave Prentis of the Unison trade union said he had written to the Metropolitan Police to complain of the poster, stating that it was a "blatant attempt to incite racial hatred" and that "to pretend that migration to the UK is only about people who are not white is to peddle the racism that has no place in a modern, caring society". [4]

Right-wing politicians also distanced themselves from the poster. Boris Johnson distanced the official Vote Leave campaign from UKIP after the reveal, stating that it was "not our campaign" and "not my politics". [4] On The Andrew Marr Show , then justice secretary Michael Gove said that "when I saw that poster I shuddered. I thought it was the wrong thing to do. I am pro-migration but I believe that the way in which we secure public support for the continued benefits that migration brings and the way in which we secure public support for helping refugees in need is if people feel they can control the numbers overall coming here." [4] [5] Similarly, George Osborne said that "there is a difference between addressing those concerns in a reasonable way and whipping up concerns, whipping up division, making baseless assertions that millions of people are going to come into the country in the next couple of years from Turkey, saying that dead bodies are going to wash up on the beaches of Kent, or indeed putting up that disgusting and vile poster that Nigel Farage did, which had echoes of literature used in the 1930s." [5] Conservative MP Neil Carmichael said that it was "disappointing to see UKIP jumping on the refugee crisis to further their own political aims. Britain can only deal with the issue of immigration by working together with European countries that face the same challenges." [4] Former UKIP MP Douglas Carswell called the poster "morally indefensible". [6]

Jonathan Jones of The Guardian stated that the poster was "the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell’s 'rivers of blood' speech," also comparing its visual language of a snaking queue to that of the unemployed people in the Conservatives' 1979 Labour Isn't Working poster. [7] Twitter users also made comparisons to Nazi propaganda footage of Jewish refugees, later shown in the 2005 BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution' . [4] When Indy100 reported these comparisons, UKIP responded that they "utterly reject the association, and would like to point out that Godwin's law applies here." [8]

Getty Images made a statement on the matter that "it is always uncomfortable when an objective news photograph is used to deliver any political message or subjective agenda. However, the image in question has been licensed legitimately". [4] Jeff Mitchell, who took the photograph, told The Guardian that its use by UKIP was "unfortunate". [9]

When challenged, Farage stated that the poster was "accurate" and "undoctored", and that Angela Merkel's migration policies concerning people who crossed the Mediterranean had made the EU "less safe". [10] [5] He responded to Michael Gove on ITV's Peston, stating that the Vote Leave campaign had also created "very strong" posters concerning immigration, and later stated in an appearance on Sky News that the poster was only the campaign's message for "one day", and that other adverts would be used later. [5] He also stated in an interview that the poster "was not about Britain", but that "it was about Schengen, about the fact Schengen is breaking". [3]

After the Brexit referendum

In July 2016, an online petition signed by nearly 40,000 people asked police to investigate whether the poster was "systematically and purposefully designed to incite and stir up fear and intolerance of immigrants in order to procure votes", and claimed that the spike in hate crime following the referendum was "a direct consequence" of UKIP's rhetoric during its campaign. [11] [1]

In late 2017 in an interview with the New Statesman , Farage stated that "Jacob [Rees-Mogg] says he thinks that poster won the referendum, because it dominated the debate for the last few days. The establishment hated it, the posh boys at Vote Leave hated it, but it was the right thing to do. Now, I don’t think we’d have won the referendum without Mrs Merkel. But that poster reminded people what Mrs Merkel had done." [6] In May 2019 on The Andrew Marr Show, Farage defended the use of the poster by UKIP but said that it would not be used by his Brexit Party because "immigration isn't the burning issue of the time". [12]

Fred Sirieix confronted Farage over the poster on an episode of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! broadcast in November 2023, calling the poster "shameful". [13]

Hungarian use of the photograph

The same photograph was used in an anti-immigration advertisement by the Hungarian Fidesz party, [3] published on 26 March 2018, [9] during the Hungarian parliamentary election. This poster added a large red stop sign graphic over the photograph, [3] obscured the presence of the white man in the photograph, and additionally cropped out the only woman visible in the original photograph. On social media, it came with a caption stating that "The government's information campaign on the migration starts into its new phase. The government wants to highlight the fact that the UN's migration guidelines would allow more immigration. We think that immigration poses a serious risk, therefore it must be stopped. The advertisements in this topic will run until the 15th of April." [9]

Academic analysis

Simon Faulkner, Hannah Guy and Farida Vis note that the combination of the image and text in the poster "displaced the meaning of the photograph from being about the movement of a specific group of refugees in Slovenia [...] to being about the purported effect of EU border policies on immigration into the UK. This shift in meaning also involved a shift in the function of the image from being a standard example of photojournalism (and therefore primarily valued for its documentary content) to a political concern to use the image to emphasise connotations of racialised otherness in relation to immigration." They stated that the photograph allowed both UKIP and Fidesz to express a "racially charged message" while "allowing them a degree of deniability" as they did not need to articulate the ideas explicitly. They also noted that the UKIP poster was less "direct" and "univocal" compared to the Fidesz poster, and suggested that the "breaking point" slogan referred to a "duality", representing both the 'breaking' of the EU and UK borders. [3]

Giorgia Aiello in the Journal of Visual Political Communication expanded on this, noting that "from a strictly political point of view," the poster "was not 'effective' – unlike the 'Vote Leave' campaign’s NHS bus". [1]

Oliver Sykes, in the journal Space and Polity, put forward that the poster, alongside other posters at the time including Vote Leave's 'Countries set to join the EU' and 'What the EU “tourist deal” means' posters, "construct[ed] a spatial imaginary of the openness of the UK to 'others' from 'other places', and notably 'openness to the East'." [14] Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy argued in Fennia that, by "contextual association" with the 2015 European migrant crisis, the poster "promote[d] anxiety" about immigrants, specifically "asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries." [2]

Andrew Reid in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice concluded that the poster warranted a non-criminal sanction from institutions like the Electoral Commission, unlike the bus decal by the Leave campaign which promised "£350 million" for the NHS, because "it belongs to a category of hateful speech that propagates false and discriminatory beliefs about its targets". [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UK Independence Party</span> British political party

The UK Independence Party is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. The party reached its greatest level of success in the mid-2010s, when it gained two members of parliament and was the largest party representing the UK in the European Parliament. The party is currently led by Nick Tenconi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nigel Farage</span> British politician and broadcaster (born 1964)

Nigel Paul Farage is a British politician and broadcaster who has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton and Leader of Reform UK since 2024, having previously been its leader from 2019 to 2021. He was the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009 and 2010 to 2016. Farage served as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Carswell</span> British politician

John Douglas Wilson Carswell is a British former politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 2005 to 2017, co-founded Vote Leave and currently serves as president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Get Britain Out</span> British lobbying group

Get Britain Out is a United Kingdom-based independent cross-party grassroots Eurosceptic group which campaigned for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The campaign is still in operation and is pushing for the UK to break away from continued alignment with the European Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Arnott</span> Brexit Party politician (born 1981)

Jonathan William Arnott is a British politician and former schoolteacher. After the 2014 European Parliament election, he served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the North East England region. Originally sitting as a UK Independence Party (UKIP) representative, he resigned from the party on 19 January 2018 to sit as an independent until designating as Brexit Party on 17 April 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum</span> Referendum on leaving the European Union

The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, commonly referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum, was a referendum that took place on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar under the provisions of the European Union Referendum Act 2015 to ask the electorate whether the country should continue to remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU). The result was a vote in favour of leaving the EU, triggering calls to begin the process of the country's withdrawal from the EU commonly termed "Brexit".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Labour Isn't Working</span> UK political advertising campaign

"Labour Isn't Working" was an advertising campaign in the United Kingdom. It was run by the Conservative Party in 1978 in anticipation that Labour Party Prime Minister James Callaghan would call a general election. It was revived for the general election campaign the next year, after the government lost a vote of no confidence in the wake of the Winter of Discontent. It was designed by advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janice Atkinson</span> British politician

Janice Ann Atkinson is a former British politician who was a Member of the European Parliament for the South East England region. She formerly represented the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and later sat as an independent: she was elected in 2014, second on the list for the region behind Nigel Farage. In March 2015, she was expelled from UKIP for "bringing the party into disrepute" after her chief of staff was recorded trying to fraudulently inflate her expenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy</span> Former political group in the European Parliament

Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy was a Eurosceptic and populist political group in the European Parliament. The EFDD group was a continuation for the Eighth European Parliament of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group that existed during the Seventh European Parliament, with significant changes to group membership.

Arron Fraser Andrew Banks is a British businessman and political donor. He is the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign. Banks was previously one of the largest donors to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and helped Nigel Farage's campaign for Britain to leave the EU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vote Leave</span> Campaign for UK withdrawal from the EU

Vote Leave was a campaigning organisation that supported a "Leave" vote in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. On 13 April 2016 it was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official campaign in favour of leaving the European Union in the Referendum.

Leave.EU was a political campaign group that was first established to support the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in the June 2016 referendum. Founded in July 2015 as The Know, the campaign was relaunched in September of that year with its name changed to "Leave.eu" to reflect altered wording in the referendum question.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grassroots Out</span> Political pressure organization in favor of Brexit

Grassroots Out (GO) was an organisation funded by Arron Banks that campaigned in favour of EU withdrawal in the 2016 referendum on EU membership in the United Kingdom. The organisation was formed in January 2016, as a result of infighting between Vote Leave and Leave.EU, and officially launched on 23 January 2016 in Kettering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2016 Hungarian migrant quota referendum</span>

A referendum related to the European Union's migrant relocation plans was held in Hungary on 2 October 2016. The referendum was initiated by the government, under the provision of article 8 of the new constitution of 2012. It was commonly referred to as the kvótanépszavazás or kvótareferendum in the Hungarian media.

The result in favour of Brexit of the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum is one of the most significant political events for Britain during the 21st century. The debate provoked major consideration to an array of topics, argued up-to, and beyond, the referendum on 23 June 2016. The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail, but he misjudged the level of public support for leaving, particularly amongst Labour Party voters. Factors included sovereignty, immigration, the economy and anti-establishment politics, amongst various other influences. The result of the referendum was that 51.8% of the votes were in favour of leaving the European Union. The formal withdrawal from the EU took place at 23:00 on 31 January 2020, almost three years after Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on 29 March 2017. This page provides an overarching analysis of the different arguments which were presented by both the Leave and Remain campaigns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leave Means Leave</span> UK pro-Brexit political pressure group

Leave Means Leave was a pro-Brexit, Eurosceptic political pressure group organisation that campaigned and lobbied for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union following the 'Leave' result of the EU referendum on 23 June 2016. The campaign was co-chaired by British property entrepreneur Richard Tice and business consultant John Longworth. The vice-chairman was Leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reform UK</span> Right-wing political party in the United Kingdom

Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. Nigel Farage has served as the party's leader since June 2024 and Richard Tice has served as the party's deputy leader since July 2024. The party currently has five members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons and one member of the London Assembly. Following Farage's resumption of the leadership during the 2024 general election, there was a sharp increase in support for the party. In the election it was the third largest party by popular vote, with 14.3 per cent of the vote.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">55 Tufton Street</span> London building housing lobby groups

55 Tufton Street is a four-storey Georgian-era townhouse on historic Tufton Street, in Westminster, London, owned by businessman Richard Smith. Since the 2010s the building has hosted a network of libertarian lobby groups and think tanks related to pro-Brexit, climate science denial and other fossil-fuel lobby groups. Some of the organisations it houses have close connections with those at 57 Tufton Street next door, including the Centre for Policy Studies and CapX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political positions of Nigel Farage</span> Views and voting record of the British politician

Nigel Farage is a British politician and broadcaster who has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton and the Leader of Reform UK since 2024, having previously been its leader from 2019 to 2021 when it was called the Brexit Party. He also was the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009, and 2010 to 2016. Farage served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) in 2020.

An election took place in the Essex constituency of Clacton on 4 July 2024, as part of the 2024 United Kingdom general election. Nigel Farage, the newly re-appointed leader of Reform UK and the former leader of the UK Independence Party, won the election with 46.2% of the vote and successfully entered Parliament after 7 previous attempts. As "figurehead of the country's populist right", Farage brought Clacton to international attention.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Aiello, Giorgia (1 April 2023). "Visual communication has always been political". Journal of Visual Political Communication. 10 (1): 7–16. doi:10.1386/jvpc_00021_1. hdl: 11585/935694 . ISSN   2633-3732.
  2. 1 2 3 Houtum, Henk Van; Bueno Lacy, Rodrigo (19 June 2017). "The political extreme as the new normal: the cases of Brexit, the French state of emergency and Dutch Islamophobia". Fennia . 195 (1): 85. doi:10.11143/fennia.64568. hdl: 2066/183044 . ISSN   1798-5617.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Faulkner, Simon; Guy, Hannah; Vis, Farida (2021). "Right-wing populism, visual disinformation, and Brexit". In Tumber, Howard; Waisbord, Silvio R. (eds.). The Routledge companion to media disinformation and populism. Routledge media and cultural studies companions (1st ed.). Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. ISBN   978-0-367-43576-9.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Stewart, Heather; Mason, Rowena (16 June 2016). "Nigel Farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police". The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2 April 2024.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Riley-Smith, Ben (19 June 2016). "EU referendum: George Osborne compares Ukip 'breaking point' migration poster to Nazi propaganda". The Daily Telegraph . ISSN   0307-1235 . Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  6. 1 2 Cowley, Jason (8 December 2017). "Nigel Farage: the arsonist in exile". New Statesman . Retrieved 2 April 2024.
  7. ↑ Jones, Jonathan (16 June 2016). "Farage's poster is the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech". The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  8. ↑ Bartlett, Evan (16 June 2016). "People are calling out Ukip's new anti-EU poster for resembling 'outright Nazi propaganda'". Indy100 . Retrieved 7 April 2024.
  9. 1 2 3 Matamoros, Cristina Abellan (28 March 2018). "Hungarian government rehashes UKIP anti-migrant poster in new ad". Euronews . Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  10. ↑ "Farage heavily criticised over 'vile' migrant poster". ITV News . 19 June 2016. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  11. ↑ Micklethwaite, Jamie (21 July 2016). "Nigel Farage and Leave campaign reported to police over Brexit poster". Evening Standard . Retrieved 14 April 2024.
  12. ↑ "Farage: Migrant poster 'transformed politics'". BBC News . 12 May 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2024.
  13. ↑ Fred Sirieix confronts Nigel Farage over 'shameful' Brexit poster. 20 November 2023. Retrieved 3 April 2024– via The Independent.
  14. ↑ Sykes, Olivier (4 May 2018). "Post-geography worlds, new dominions, left behind regions, and 'other' places: unpacking some spatial imaginaries of the UK's 'Brexit' debate". Space and Polity. 22 (2): 137–161. doi: 10.1080/13562576.2018.1531699 . ISSN   1356-2576.
  15. ↑ Reid, Andrew (29 May 2019). "Buses and Breaking Point: Freedom of Expression and the 'Brexit' Campaign" (PDF). Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 22 (3): 623–637. doi:10.1007/s10677-019-09999-1. ISSN   1386-2820.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.