Breaking Point (UKIP poster)

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".

[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.

[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.

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".

[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".

[3] 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.

"[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".

"[9] 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.

[1] 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 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] 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.