The brilliant poster showing the real threats to the country

The brilliant Breaking Point poster from Led By Donkeys (Pic: @ByDonkeys) - Credit: @ByDonkeys

Anti-Brexit campaigners have hijacked Nigel Farage’s infamous Breaking Point poster to put the real threats to the country in the spotlight.

Led By Donkeys, together with For our Future’s Sake, today hired the exact same van used by Farage to launch his referendum poster showing a queue of mostly non-white migrants and refugees with the slogan ‘Breaking point: the EU has failed us all’ and drove it to Westminster’s Smith Square, the same place he launched it.

But they gave it a redesign: replacing the migrants with Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, David Davis and Farage himself, and tagging it ‘The UK is being swamped by a tide of incompetents’.

The campaigners said: ‘By taking the exact same ad van that Nigel Farage used to launch his vile poster in 2016 and replacing it with our own version, we hope to go a little way towards cleansing our country of that noxious moment.

‘It’s not desperate people fleeing war who have brought our country to the brink. It’s not refugees who are threatening our factories and crashing our currency.

‘Children seeking asylum aren’t responsible for a policy that could see Britain suffering food shortages. All of that is on Farage and his hard-right Brexit allies.

‘His original Breaking Point poster was a nasty piece of bullying vilification that targeted the vulnerable. Now we’re putting the real threat to our country in the spotlight – Farage and his hard-right fellow travellers.’

Controversy over the original poster prompted Boris Johnson to distance the official leave campaign from Ukip, and a string of politicians from Nicola Sturgeon to Yvette Cooper condemned it.

Johnson, who led the official Vote Leave campaign, said the poster was ‘not our campaign’ and ‘not my politics’.

Farage unveiled the poster in Westminster with the subheading: ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.’ The photograph used was of migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, with the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text.

Cooper, the Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford, who has campaigned on behalf of refugees, 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.’

Led By Donkeys are a group taking the historic Brexit pronouncements of political leaders, turning them into tweets and putting them on large billboards across the nation.

Previous posters show Johnson saying ‘There is no plan for no deal, because we’re going to get a great deal’ and David Cameron’s famous and now discredited ‘Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband’.