Revealed: Edinburgh ad firm behind Ukip’s notorious Breaking Point Brexit poster

AN Edinburgh advertising firm was responsible for Ukip’s “vile” anti-refugee poster which triggered nearly 40,000 complaints to the police during the EU referendum. Family Advertising Ltd was the brains behind Breaking Point, which featured a long queue of migrants, and received £100,000 from Ukip for its work during the Brexit campaign. However, the company does not list Ukip on the former client section of its website. Although the pro-Brexit campaign won the referendum last year, supporters of leaving the European Union were split on strategy and tactics.

Vote Leave, the official campaign, balanced messages on the economy and immigration, while Leave.eu and Ukip focused more on immigration. On June 16, days before the vote, Farage ramped up the rhetoric on immigration with a poster campaign launched outside the EU’s London offices. The advert featured mostly non-white refugees crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015 next to the Breaking Point slogan and words: “The EU has failed us all.”

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon described the intervention as “disgusting”, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said the poster was a “blatant attempt to incite racial hatred”, and George Osborne said it was “vile” and had “echoes of literature used in the 1930s”.

Even prominent Leave campaigners distanced themselves from the shock tactics. Michael Gove said he “shuddered” when he saw the image and Boris Johnson said the poster was “not our campaign” and “not my politics”. Hours after the poster