Breaking Point (UKIP poster)

Breaking Point is a campaign 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".

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, and several media outlets highlighted the poster's similarity to propaganda in Nazi Germany. The same photograph was later used by the Hungarian Fidesz party in another poster during the build up to the 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election.

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

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", 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.

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

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".

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". 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." 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." 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." Former UKIP MP Douglas Carswell called the poster "morally indefensible".

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. 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'. 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."