AN anti-migrant poster unveiled by UKIP leader Nigel Farage and later withdrawn was compared to Nazi propaganda footage in a social media campaign headed by a Scottish political activist.
The Breaking Point poster was reported to the police with a complaint that it incites racial hatred and breaches UK race laws by Dave Prentis, of the Unison union.
READ MORE: Nigel Farage: I have no idea what will happen if UK votes to leave EU
Twitter was awash with the poster's inadvertent similarity to chilling Nazi propaganda footage of migrants shown by the BBC in the first part of its six-part documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution from 2005.
The poster, which was branded as disgusting by Nicola Sturgeon, features a line of Syrian refugees fleeing from a war-zone, with the call to "take back controls of our borders".
READ MORE: Nigel Farage: I have no idea what will happen if UK votes to leave EU
Connor Beaton, of the Scottish Socialist Party's Dundee branch's tweet making a comparison first made by another went viral with over 8000 retweets and over one million views.
The tweet from Mr Beaton, a former North East candidate for RISE the left-wing alliance for the Scottish Parliament said: "Your new poster resembles outright Nazi propaganda, @Nigel_Farage."
On Monday Farage said the poster had been withdrawn, connecting it to the shocking murder last week of MP Jo Cox who had campaigned for refugees’ rights.
READ MORE: Nigel Farage: I have no idea what will happen if UK votes to leave EU
He said it was "unfortunate timing that within a couple of hours this terrible tragic murder took place and when we saw that, we immediately withdrew the poster because we understood it was a day for everyone to go quiet and be silent”.
Your new poster resembles outright Nazi propaganda, @Nigel_Farage. Thanks to @brendanjharkin for pointing it out. pic.twitter.com/Rd89XZSvfD
— Connor Beaton (@zcbeaton) June 16, 2016
But he has defended the use of the image of queuing refugees on the Slovenia border, saying it was similar to one of a queue used by UKIP in the mayoral elections, though that poster did not use an image of real people or of refugees.
He added:" I didn’t invent the picture – that picture was real … This poster was designed for the day. It was unfortunate timing that within a couple of hours this terrible tragic murder took place."
The photograph used was of migrants fleeing Syria into Slovenia in 2015.
Asked whether it was misleading to use a photograph of refugees in the Schengen zone, of which Britain is not a member Farage said: “We are members of a political union which is failing and we get the knock-on effects.”
Farage, who is not part of the official Leave campaign, says the scene depicted was "a direct result" of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to open her country's doors to Syrian refugees, which he described as "one of the biggest political failures of modern times".
Leading Leave campaigner Michael Gove says he "shuddered" when he saw UKIP's "breaking point" anti-EU poster.
The justice secretary joined a number of politicians attacking the poster, featuring a photo taken in Slovenia, with George Osborne saying it had "echoes" of 1930s' literature.
Osborne launched a furious attack on the poster saying: “I think there is a difference between addressing those concerns [about immigration] 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, or 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.
“That is what we should say no to and this referendum vote is a vote on the kind of Britain we want.”
Farage in defending the poster said it was “the truth about what’s going on” .
Farage launched the poster with a battlebus tour through Westminster last week followed by 10 vans plastered with the image.
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