The assemblage of British politics’ breaking point

Abstract

This paper investigates the UKIP Breaking Point advertisement, which appeared prominently during the Brexit referendum campaign and used a documentary photograph of Syrian refugees, implying that they were migrating to Britain. We chart the assemblage through which the transformation of the image occurred: starting as Jeffrey Mitchell’s documentary photograph, charting news of the journey of a group of refugees, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an expression of political notoriety. The controversy generated by the advertisement serves as an example of advertising's meaning becoming a source of unpredictable contestation as different interests clash to define the image’s ‘real’ meaning. Rather than take advertising as a managed process, with meaning directly encoded and carefully crafted by producers, a cultural politics of advertising perceives advertisements as comprised of raw material whose meanings are ambiguous, negotiable and politically charged. Through this lens, advertising images are contextualized by a process of production and consumption, partly shaped by the producers of the advertisement, but also largely mediated by responses of the wider public, creative fields from where the original image was produced, and by unforeseen factors, such as when texts become overtaken by events and appropriated by intermediaries. Breaking Point, in other words, presents a perfect example to illustrate that advertising is not merely a passive channel that represents but is instead an assemblage able to shape engagement and (coercively) infer meanings and draw distorted patterns from different social worlds.

On 23 October 2015, a large group was escorted by police to the Brežice refugee camp, after Hungary closed its border. Thousands – mostly Syrian refugees – walked along the border between Croatia and Slovenia. Overlooking from a bridge, Jeffrey Mitchell photographed them using a condensing lens to emphasise their closeness and mass (Beaumont-Thomas, 2016). The image appeared across global media representing wartime migration but later re-appeared as an advertisement for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) campaign during the British Brexit referendum. The advertisement featured Mitchell’s image and bore the tagline ‘Breaking Point: The EU Has Failed Us All. We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’.

Boris Johnson denounced the poster as ‘not our campaign’ and ‘not my politics’ (Stewart and Mason, 2016), while Chancellor George Osborne described the poster as ‘vile’ (Wright, 2016) and Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, as ‘disgusting’ (Phipps et al., 2018). Yet the ad was a critical moment in a successful Brexit campaign and remains amongst the most iconic - and notorious - political advertisements.

This paper charts the assemblage through which the image transformed: starting as Mitchell’s documentary photograph, charting news of the refugee’s journey, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an object of notoriety. The ad’s controversy exemplifies how meaning become unpredictably contested as interests clash to define its ‘real’ meaning. Rather than take advertising as a managed process, with meaning directly defined by producers, a cultural politics of advertising perceives advertisements as comprised of raw material with ambiguous, negotiable and politically charged meanings. Advertising images are contextualised by a process of production and consumption and mediated by responses of the wider public, creative fields from image’s origins, and unforeseen factors, like when texts are overtaken by events and appropriated by intermediaries. Breaking Point presents a perfect example to illustrate that advertising is not merely a passive channel that represents but an assemblage able to shape engagement and (coercively) infer meanings and draw distorted patterns from different social worlds.

Theoretical foundations

Tacit assumptions that consumer culture extends liberal democracy are being upturned by market-driven polarising of the public sphere that Ulver (2021a) refers to as ‘unpolitical’ and Dean as ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2009). These theories detail algorithmic driving of heavily affected content that profitably fragment and extend entrenched political discourse and erode democratic capacities. Such studies implicate advertising into broader analyses of changes to how ‘content’ circulates causes political transformation. Meanwhile affect theorists like Berlant (2011) and Davies (2018) note a more generalised tendency for ‘feelings’ to shape the world; what Davies terms ‘the nervous state’. This article explores a case of affective destabilisation by examining a case grounded in traditional modes of promotion; billboard and newsprint advertising that remediated a single photographic image.

We apply themes from photography studies and social science to examine the dynamic lives of advertisements, charting Breaking Point’s emergence as an advert assembled from carefully chosen and positioned texts and images, to its impact, in terms of public response and its meaning as historical artefact. Rather than attempt a textual analysis of how themes of xenophobia become manifest in advertising (as pursued by Ulver’s analysis of Volvo ads, 2021b), we chart the life-course of an advertisement by following its biographical trajectory. Paraphrasing Lash and Lury (2004), the questions become: What are the key components of the image? Who are the central figures? What are the key moments? How are the pivotal transactions managed? What apparently tangential issues divert, recast, and redirect the initial project? How is the image and its content transformed – and how does it transform itself – from stage to stage, context to context? In order to pose – and address – these questions, we turn to the assemblage paradigm to provides a conceptual lens that allows us to understand political advertising by focusing on the relationships embodied by the assemblage as an empirical object of research.

The ‘Breaking Point’ ad was a signal moment in the dealignment of British political communication and therefore its mediation via the apparatus of consumer culture should be comprehended. Influenced by arguments that if we are to understand the ideological properties of advertising we cannot rely on textual analysis, we document how this advertisement was produced and became notorious. This descriptiveness and storytelling is uncommon for this journal but we say it is important that the phenomenon be documented and that we should want to know how such an advert came to be made. Thus we engaged with landmark histories of Brexit campaigning as well as UKIP and Nigel Farage, then conducted archival analysis of media responses to the advertisement. As we do not present a content analysis but detail receptions, we draw from helpful studies that have done this work (e.g. Memou, 2019). Ultimately we demonstrate how these correspondences and convergences are central to an overall political climate best comprehended as an assemblage.

The word ‘assemblage’ has many entry points but is prominently associated with Deleuze and Guattari, although is not a word they employed but is a translation of ‘agencement’ (see Phillips 2006); a French word chosen by Deleuze to convey a “multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establish liaisons, relations between them” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 69). It is in this sense of multiplicity and heterogeneity that we engage assemblage, with particular reference to specific characteristics of the structures depicted by the assemblage paradigm. Thus conceptualised as a multidimensional concept, an assemblage encompasses specific relationships between different entities that comprise it. Applying an assemblage lens to Breaking Point, we will demonstrate how to conceive the poster as an artefact around which a coherent assemblage became configured, providing insight into the relationships between the various components shaping it.

Before applying an assemblage paradigm a second clarification is required. There are different, perhaps contradictory, ways of conceptualising assemblages, but there are characteristics common to influential approaches (see DeLanda, 2006: 251–252; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 323–337; Roffe, 2016: 43–44; Buchanan, 2021: 20–22). These include the following:

Scale: an assemblage is comprised of component entities from a lower scale as a relation of parts to wholes. There is therefore no predetermined unit of analysis, such as individuals or institutions, and thus no ultimate foundation for examining social or political relations.

Dynamic: the component entities comprising assemblages are dynamically interacting and interdependent. The processes generated through these interactions and interdependencies are the source of the emergence of self-organising entities on a higher scale. The dynamic relationship between components maintains or transforms the assemblage.

Heterogeneous: the components that comprise an assemblage are not indistinguishable units but instead retain their multiplicity and varied character, expressing a structure of different facets rather than a common unit of analysis.

Material-semiotic: an assemblage draws on material and semiotic structures, i.e. comprises configurations of mutually affecting material and semiotic entities, which irrespective of their difference – object/subject, nature/culture, etc. – possess a uniform ontological status; that of a unique historically contingent individual entity (see Roffe, 2016: 50; DeLanda, 2016: 22–25)

Taken together these features characterise assemblages as entities comprised of other (component) entities but with characteristics that cannot be reduced to descriptions of those entities. The properties of emerging assemblages are therefore not the result of the aggregation of the characteristics of the things comprising them, but instead they are formed through the circumstances in which things combine. So conceptualised, the assemblage paradigm implies that systems are defined and shaped by the processes they perform. It therefore addresses how things unfold in relation to each other and disclose why they unfold (see Buchanan, 2021). As a framework for examining the work done by Mitchell’s photograph and the Breaking Point poster during Brexit campaigning, the assemblage paradigm provides a conceptual tool by focusing on the relationships embodied by the assemblage as an empirical object of research.

Applying an assemblage lens to an expanded documentation of Breaking Point allows us to avoid reductive framings of advertising as the production and dissemination of closed and fixed cultural texts, defined by what singular actors simply referred to as ‘advertisements’, that are directly received and understood by intended audiences. We instead use assemblage theory to correlate that broader circuit of production and consumption linking producers of raw materials used in the ad (in this case, Mitchell’s image), those who commissioned the ad (the political donor Paul Sykes and UKIP), those who produced the ad (Family), and the various media channels and audiences who respond (other political parties, trade unions, the voting public). Further, there is the text’s broader cultural level, including documentary photography, British political advertising and the ‘engineering of consent’ shaping (and shaped by) the broad context of the Brexit debate.

The image

In 2011 war in Syria left 12 million dependent on humanitarian aid. In the following years about 6.7 million Syrians became refugees - a near unprecedented scale of migration. Initially the majority fled to neighbouring countries, such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which by 2014 registered a total of 3 million refugees, while around 100,000 entered Europe. By 2015, about one million Syrians had entered Europe (see unrefugees.org for details). In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Syrian refugees were welcome in Germany. This acerbated a chaotic situation – according to EU law, asylum seekers must apply in the first European country they land, but now were incentivised to continue towards Germany and do so quickly while Merkel’s open-door policy remained. 4000 refugees died attempting to reach Europe, mostly drowning in the Mediterranean (Memou, 2019).

In April 2015 two shipwrecks occurred just 6 days apart, in which roughly 1100 people are thought to have died (Hayden, 2022). Then on 2 September 2015, the body of 3-year old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on Bodrum beach, and was photographed by Nilufer Demir for the Turkish Dogan News Agency (Memou, 2019). Aylan was one of twelve, including his mother and brother, who drowned attempting a boat crossing between Bodrum and Kos. Demir took several photographs – one featured Aylan’s body face down in sand with palms upturned, and another of a coastguard carrying the body. The image was compelling, inspiring comparisons with Michelangelo’s Pietà (Trilling, 2019), while the familiarity of Aylan’s clothing -blue trainers and red t-shirt - allowed Europeans to empathize (Memou, 2019). These upsetting images were disseminated to campaigning organizations, apparently in frustration with how the crisis was being ignored. The image was Tweeted by a human rights official with a large following, then retweeted by prominent correspondents. Several editors decided, independently of one another, to publish the image on front pages so that the image quickly became ubiquitous across media and immediately elicited enormous shock and charity donations (Trilling, 2019).

According to Memou (2019), the image displaced the event that preceded the photograph by becoming the event itself. She argues that the image typifies western response to mass crises by emphasising individualistic rhetoric and representing complex socio-political phenomena as personal tragedy (p. 83). This trope, where mass crisis is represented as a child’s vulnerability, is well established. Notably, in 1993 the New York Times published Kevin Carter’s photograph of an undernourished Sudanese child being observed by a vulture. Such representation of extreme vulnerability raises ethical issues and despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photograph, Carter committed suicide with many associating his death with the image’s controversy (Memou, 2019).

These debates remind us that images of crisis are themselves framed and these frames are cultural modes regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a particular selectivity (Butler, 2009). Documentary photographers, therefore, are mediators conveying information about dispossessed and vulnerable people to more powerful groups (Memou, 2019). For Butler (2009) the frames through which we apprehend precarious lives of others are politically saturated and therefore operations of power limiting spheres of appearance. Indeed those depicted by documentary photography are rendered passive; their representation dependent on photographers.

The contrast between Aylan Kurdi’s iconic images and Mitchell’s image is revealing. Rather than individuating a child victim to elicit sympathy, Mitchell’s represents mass migration within which Aylan’s journey is subsumed. Mitchell, then Getty’s European News Photographer of the Year, describes the moment:

Trains would arrive from Croatia, about 1,500 people would get off, and they’d walk 8km across the border to Brežice holding camp. Then they’d wait until the next train was ready to take them to the Austrian border. It was like a conveyor belt. … It was like a scene out of the second world war. The Slovenians clearly didn’t realise people would come in these numbers. It was thousands. It was endless. The police would march them. First, they’d snake through cornfields, and eventually they’d come to an old railway line, where this was taken. The traumatic look on their faces comes from being kettled. But there weren’t a lot of police controlling them: they were really well-behaved, patient people. … They all had just one objective: to get a new life – in Germany, Austria, Sweden, wherever. Everyone would say: “Germany, Germany!” That’s where they most wanted to go. No one wanted to end up in Serbia or Croatia. That was a big fear – that they would get stuck in a country where they were stopped in. There was real frustration, a feeling that if they didn’t go now, the borders would shut. And as we know, that eventually happened. There were a lot of Afghans, but it was mainly Syrians – and men. They’d be going first, trying to get set up in a new country. They were younger and fitter, more able to battle to get on transport. When a train turned up, they’d been stuck in a station so long, they’d climb in through the windows. It was desperate. But what they’re coming from is desperate too. There is no life, nothing left, in cities like Aleppo and Homs (Beaumont-Thomas, 2016).

The photograph, taken where the route curved with a telephoto lens to flatten perspective, was designed to capture as many people as possible. As Michell recounts:

It was a very flat walk, so I scoped out a bridge to shoot from. I knew exactly what lens I was going to use, to compress the group, to show many people were there. I could have walked with them the whole length, photographing how people were struggling, but you can sum it all up in one picture (Beaumont-Thomas, 2016).

In contrasting Mitchell’s image with Demir’s, key differences are identifiable. As noted by Memou (2019), Mitchell’s image was one of several images depicting refugees as a homogenous mass or as crowds overwhelming infrastructure. Mitchell’s image is of men, none of whom are identified. In contrast to the heartbreaking image of Aylan Kurdi, the men in Mitchell’s image are fungible. This corresponds with a broader tendency to refer to people migrating as ‘migrants’ - despite having drastically different backgrounds – to lump people together, demonising them in public discourse and creating an artificial separation between them and the rest of society (Hayden, 2022).

In contrasting the images, different styles of reporting the ‘crisis’ are evident, each mobilising a different assemblage. The first recurred in media emphasising ‘human interest’, whose images and narratives depicted vulnerability: women, children, the elderly, families, the ill. The second related stories about men, typically as homogenous groups, bringing border stress points to the verge of collapse, using narrative terms such as ‘backdoor’ and ‘illegal’ to question their rights as refugees. This latter discourse routinely blurred divisions between ‘genuine’ refugees and paranoia over ‘mere’ economic migrants, or worse, terrorists, opportunistically concealed in mass peregrination (Žižek, 2018). This contradictory media coverage prompted unanswered questions, as posed by Trilling (2019): who are these people and what do they want from us? Why don’t they stop in the first safe country they reach? Why don’t the men stay behind and fight? How can we make room for everyone? Are they bringing their problems to our shores? Do they threaten our culture and values? Such lingering concerns were compounded by media outlets that maintained anti-immigrant editorial values.

Mitchell, however, emphasised his objectivity:

My job – telling the story of the migrants – had been done. It’s just unfortunate how it’s been picked up… Newspapers also use shots in the wrong context. It depends on the political slant of any organisation. You have to remain impartial. I’m there to record what happens. I know it sounds simplistic, but you shoot what’s in front of you (Beaumont-Thomas, 2016).

Mitchell’s comment that ‘you shoot what’s in front of you’ does not acknowledge his lens selection to create deliberate affect and, as argued, any photographer’s decision to represent migration as concerning vulnerable individuals, or homogenous blocks, is always subjective. As Rosler (2004) claims, documentary photography conveys photographers’ manipulativeness and savvy.

Mitchell’s photograph must be contextualised in the period’s intensity; Hungary closing borders to refugees and erecting razor borders marked an extraordinary moment in European border control. By October 2015, 300,000 Syrian refugees had arrived in Germany and, while crowds welcomed refugees in Munich Station, there were about 600 attacks on refugees in Germany that year. Tension was stoked by ‘Islamic State’ attacks in Paris in November and by news that a group of around 1000 ‘Arab or North African’ men sexually harassed women celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne (Welle, 2016). Both incidents provoked widespread xenophobia, renewing controversial debates about a latent ‘clash of civilizations’.

The ‘migrant crisis’ was, for Trilling (2019), ‘one of the most heavily mediated world events of the past decade. It unfolded around the edges of a wealthy and technologically developed region, home to several major centres of the global media industry. Scenes of desperation, suffering and rescue that might normally be gathered by foreign correspondents in harder-to-access parts of the world were now readily available to reporters, news crews, filmmakers and artists at relatively low cost’. The fragmented and contradictory coverage overlooked how the crisis had not suddenly arrived into Europe, but rather stemmed from European foreign policy, and from border policies motivating refugees to move quickly through peripheral European countries. As Žižek (2018) argues, framing mass migration as humanitarian crisis always posits the crisis as a question of hospitality, overlooking what asylum seekers really want; not sanctuary in another culture but to remain safely in their own country, and so the European role in causing displacement disappears.

Commissioning the billboard advertisement

As the ‘migrant crisis’ continued into 2016, UK was nearing a referendum over EU membership. A pillar of the EU is internal freedom of movement. Immigration to UK was rising - net migration had been 177,000 in 2012, 209,000 in 2013, then 318,000 in 2014 (Shipman, 2016: loc662). Meanwhile, in the French port Calais, an encampment of 6,000 people hoping to cross the English Channel became known as ‘Calais Jungle’ (Mulholland, 2015). Prime Minister David Cameron referred to ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain’, attracting condemnation for dehumanising language (BBC News, 2015). The ‘refugee crisis’ was a tense subject that drew on earlier concerns on immigration to the UK.

The referendum on EU Membership had been a Conservative Party manifesto commitment during their 2015 general election campaign designed to appeal to voters sympathetic to UKIP. During this election campaign the key themes, narratives, discourse and coalitions eventually assembled by the Leave and Remain sides of the Brexit referendum were already taking shape. It is this assemblage that will be examined shortly, but one key component, the political poster advertisement, had itself became a theme of the election, with commentators predicting their demise (Wheeler, 2015). In response Chris Burgess, curator of the People’s History Museum argued:

The interplay between words and images, which has ‘rich history’ in British politics, can get a message across - and set the mood of a campaign - far more effectively than any speech (Burgess quoted in Wheeler, 2015).

Examining what this ‘interplay’ tells us about the assemblage shaping the relationship between political events outlined earlier in the article, the discourse underpinning the Breaking Point poster and the use of the poster to operate the images and discourse in building its coalition of voters is this article’s objective. Detail concerning the campaign’s unfolding and the framework for evaluating the relationships underpinning it will be presented shortly. But first we overview the background to the ad’s commissioning, detailing how these relationships were drawn together to produce the ad.

UKIP long campaigned against EU immigration. During 2014 European elections, UKIP posters illustrated an unemployed British builder begging, with the caption: “EU policy at work. British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labour” while another stated that 26 million unemployed people were “looking for work”, “And whose jobs are they after?” (Holehouse, 2015). The advertisements were subsidised by Paul Sykes, a property developer who wanted advertising to speak directly to working class voters, whom he regarded as struggling, blue-collar workers threatened by low-skilled EU migrants (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015: 37). Responding to objections, party leader Nigel Farage commented: ‘These posters are a hard-hitting reflection of reality as it is experienced by millions of British people struggling to earn a living outside the Westminster bubble. Are we going to ruffle a few feathers among the chattering classes? Yes. Are we bothered about that? Not in the slightest. UKIP is hugely grateful to Paul Sykes for his magnificent contribution to the great cause of restoring Britain’s ability to be a self-governing nation’ (Holehouse, 2014). Other issues raised by Farage included how migrants arrived HIV positive, how the West was under threat from a ‘fifth column living within our own countries’… which was ‘out to destroy our whole civilization and our way of life’, and that mosques were ‘pushing a deeply unpleasant and anti-Christian heritage culture’ (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015: 214).

Sykes previously commissioned the Edinburgh-based creative agency Family, who established themselves in politics during their successful NOtoAV referendum campaign regarding voting methods in 2011 (Hutcheon, 2017). Sykes insisted that UKIP use the agency. Interestingly Family sought to push UKIP in a different direction (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015). At a strategy meeting prior to the 2015 election, Family strategists made presentations to UKIP leadership arguing for a positioning that would ‘represent fairness and be inclusive’, ‘offer hope and reassurance’, and not be the ‘angry party of the doom-mongers’. The campaign was to have little mention of immigration and not be a ‘shock and awe campaign’ (p. 213). The reception was negative with one UKIP official wondering ‘what would the white van man say?[i]’, and another suggested that Family had lost sight of ‘who the enemy is’ (p. 213). [i] The ‘man with the white van’ is a cliché in British politics which refers to the reactionary elements of the white working class. In 2014, Labour politician Emily Thornberry was forced to resign following a tweet in which she used the cliché. Farage’s response:

‘PPE bollocks[i],’ he said. ‘This is madness. What is going on?’ Contrary to what he had just heard, Farage was clear in stating that he wanted to use the campaign to ‘own the immigration debate’. Nobody dissented. ‘Immigration, immigration, immigration and Nigel. That is what we thought,’ said Stanbury. It was at this moment that Farage and his loyalists took ownership of the campaign, deciding there and then that the controversial issue would be placed at the heart of their campaign (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015 p. 225).[i] ‘PPE’ refers to the Oxford University degree and masters course in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Many influential politicians studied this degree and to many, it is seen as constitutive of the production of a particular type of politician and ‘groupthink’ political mindset.

When referendum campaigning began, the leave movement split: Vote Leave included Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, and was coordinated by Dominic Cummings, while Leave. eu was fronted by Farage and bankrolled by wealthy donors like Sykes and Arron Banks. The government and main ‘remain’ campaigners tended to emphasise the economic risks of Brexit – the so-called ‘Project Fear’.

Generally, the Vote Leave campaign focussed on economic issues while Leave.eu addressed anti-immigration. There were exceptions: in May 2016, Vote Leave produced a poster featuring footsteps towards an open door shaped like a passport, stating ‘Turkey (Population Seventy-Six Million) is Joining the EU’. Conservative politician Penny Mordaunt identified the possibility of large-scale Turkish immigration as a ‘threat to UK security’; ‘because of the EU’s free movement laws’, she claimed, ‘the government will be unable to exclude Turkish criminals from entering the UK’ (Shipman, 2016: loc5462). Meanwhile Michael Gove stated: ‘The EU is already opening visa-free travel to Turkey. That would create a borderless travel zone from the frontiers of Syria and Iraq to the English Channel’ (Shipman, 2016: loc5466).

In the campaign’s final days Sykes wished to spend £2 million on advertising, with a prominent ad to appear daily. He stated: ‘It’s going to be great. It will be an ad campaign you’ll be able to see from the moon’. Initially the campaign was offered to Vote Leave but was vetoed because their leaders did not want to work with Sykes (Shipman, 2016: loc 6994).

Instead, Sykes’ offer was accepted by UKIP. Farage and Chris Bruni-Lowe travelled to Syke’s home, as Bruni-Lowe recounted: ‘We spent two days brainstorming ideas. This was around the time of the campaign when no one was talking about migration apart from us. We were 10 points behind. Our view is we needed to do some hard-hitting immigration stuff to maximise our vote, to give us a chance of winning’ (Shipman, 2016: loc6994). The first billboard ad to launch the campaign of six posters was Breaking Point.

The poster launch

Farage launched the poster campaign on 16^th June by being photographed in front of the billboard in Westminster, leading to a second image widely reproduced across media (Phipps, et al., 2018). As Memou (2019) states: the news image presented a ‘striking contrast between the individual — Farage — and the crowd of refugees, which appears to be moving uncontrollably towards Farage, and by implication onwards, towards us, the viewers’ (p. 88). Challenged by journalists at the launch, Farage stated:

This is a photograph – an accurate, undoctored photograph – taken on 15 October last year following Angela Merkel’s call in the summer and, frankly, if you believe, as I have always believed, that we should open our hearts to genuine refugees, that’s one thing. But, frankly, as you can see from this picture, most of the people coming are young males and, yes, they may be coming from countries that are not in a very happy state, they may be coming from places that are poorer than us, but the EU has made a fundamental error that risks the security of everybody (Stewart and Mason, 2016).

When a journalist noted that the people were refugees, Farage responded:

You don’t know that. They are coming from all over the world. If you get back to the Geneva Convention definition, you will find very few people that came into Europe last year would actually qualify as genuine refugees. We have just had – in the last two weeks, the Dusseldorf bomb plot has been uncovered – a very, very worrying plan for mass attacks along the style of Paris or Brussels. All of those people came into Germany last year posing as refugees. When Isis say they will use the migrant crisis to flood the continent with their jihadi terrorists, they probably mean it (Stewart and Mason, 2016).

The poster, designed by Family and using Mitchell’s image of the migrants (licensed from Getty Images) evoked the Conservatives’ 1979 iconic ‘Labour’s Not Working’ ad depicting a winding queue indicating that unemployment had reached one million; however, it also evoked sinister political communication: ‘1930s fascist propaganda’ (Wright, 2016) and bearing similarity “with Nazi propaganda films warning about the ‘Jewish threat’” (Memou, 2019: 88).

Within moments Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, tweeted: ‘this is disgusting’ (Stewart and Mason, 2016). The Green Party promptly declared: ‘this is a poster of shame’, labelling the poster ‘despicable’, and a collective statement was quickly issued from members of the Conservative Party, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Greens all condemning the poster. Labour MP Yvette Cooper commented: ‘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’ (Stewart and Mason, 2016).

Minutes after Farage’s poster launch, the Labour MP and remain activist Jo Cox was stabbed and shot dead by a man shouting: ‘Britain First’. The murder stunned the body politic and immediately campaigning was suspended. Within hours, David Prentis of the Unison trade union wrote to Metropolitan police complaining that the poster was a ‘blatant attempt to incite racial hatred. This is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form’. An online petition calling for Farage to be charged with hate speech attracted 43,000 signatures (Lusher, 2016a). Boris Johnson distanced himself from the poster stating it was ‘not our campaign’ and ‘not my politics’ (Stewart and Mason, 2016). Getty Images stated: ‘It is always uncomfortable when an objective news photograph is used to deliver any political message or subjective agenda’ (Stewart and Mason, 2016). Labour frontbencher Emily Thornberry stated: ‘I thought that Nigel Farage’s poster was disgusting. We have a responsibility as politicians not to play the race card. Nigel Farage was attempting to divide people and get the debate about Europe to be just about immigration and about fear. I think that poster was unforgiveable, it was irresponsible. He should be ashamed of himself’ (Shipman, 2016: loc6994).

Condemnations accumulated: Chancellor George Osbourne condemned ‘that disgusting and vile poster that Nigel Farage did which had echoes of literature used in the 1930s’ (Wright, 2016) and Vote Leave’s Michael Gove commented: ‘When I saw that poster I shuddered, I thought it was the wrong thing to do’ (Telegraph, 2016). Former Conservative chair, Sayeeda Warsi, announced she would no longer support the campaign as the ad was ‘perpetuating a set of lies about who those people are, where they were going, suggesting they were coming to the United Kingdom. This kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink xenophobic racist campaign may be politically savvy or useful in the short term but it causes long-term damage to communities’ (Elgot, 2016).

Within hours extreme pressure from Brexit campaigners was applied to cancel the campaign (Crick, 2022). Yet Farage was being encouraged to hold firm. Arron Banks, UKIP’s financier, believed the ad ‘offended the Westminster bubble of journalists, but it doesn’t offend the rest of the country’ (Shipman, 2016: loc7024). Together Farage and Banks concocted an apology of sorts. Addressing Channel 4 News (Channel 4 News, 2016), Farage said ‘what I apologise for is the timing’. Andy Wigmore’s, Bank’s campaign spokesman, later explained the ‘apology’ was designed to keep immigration in the headlines: ‘we wanted to keep immigration in people’s minds as long as possible, so apologizing for the timing kept the things going for another day or two. You can argue about the sensitivities of it, but all the polling we had right from the beginning said, ‘If you’re talking about immigration, you’re winning; if you’re talking about the economy, you’re losing’ (Shipman, 2016: loc7024).

Farage later commented, ‘By Monday [20^th June] the whole debate was on immigration again. Whatever miseries I’d had to withstand – and the media was the most aggressive I’ve ever seen in my life, as if I’d actually done it [murdered Jo Cox] – but by Monday morning, we realised the debate is back on migration’ (Shipman, 2016:loc7028).

Worried that the advertisement was associated with Cox’s murder, Banks commissioned a poll then reported to LBC Radio that ordinary voters did not see the advertisement as linked. Asked if the polling was ‘tasteless’, he responded: ‘I don’t think so’ (BBC News, 2016). But Farage was repeatedly asked media questions about how his poster corresponded with Cox’s murderer; he responded ‘That man acted in isolation. What that man did was an act of barbarism and every one of us who will go out to vote to leave condemns utterly and thoroughly what he did’ (ITV News, 2016). Not everybody was convinced. Bart Cammaerts (2016) commented: ‘This juxtaposition between the patriot and the traitor and the legitimization by the Brexit-campaign of a xenophobe agenda undeniably provided the moral context in which the political murder of Jo Cox took place’. Labour politician Stephen Kinnick tearfully told parliament: ‘Rhetoric has consequences… when insecurity, fear and anger are used to light a fuse, then an explosion is inevitable’ (Stocker, 2017: loc2110). As Farage’s earlier comments on his campaign strategy indicate very clearly, xenophobic rhetoric was a key component of the Breaking Point assemblage in mobilising anti-immigrant feeling to drive the ‘leave’ vote. We now turn to the mechanism underpinning this assemblage.

Breaking point assemblage

The Breaking Point assemblage bridges multiple levels of interaction and is operationalised in being able to assemble components from a variety of cultural realms. Campaigns are able to unify different entities including narratives, slogans, images, voters, activists, cohorts, institutions, communication technologies, material artefacts and other components into discrete ‘voting’ communities. The Breaking Point poster articulates the campaign and operates in many ways as a boundary object (see Star and Griesemer, 1989). The poster assembles heterogeneous components through its character as sufficiently flexible to be adaptable across social worlds, though not too flexible by becoming unable to maintain its coherent identity. Through its mediation and translation, the Breaking Point assemblage develops hegemonic influence, enrolling material entities, rights, myths and other narratives into a coalition that become agents of change or agents of resistance circulating through and shaping the values and practices that contextualise the two referendum options. As with boundary objects, the Breaking Point assemblage is not merely a passive channel to represent or inform, but also shapes engagement and (coercively) infers meanings and draws distorted patterns from different social worlds. By preserving and maintaining multiplicity in building its coalitions, an assemblage such as that structured by the Breaking Point poster, embodies the mechanisms and models able to mobilise affective narratives and discourses. This can be illustrated by defining the Breaking Point assemblage through these relationships, to which we now turn.

An assemblage is not simply a network or laundry list of different things and events, but also ‘entails a constructive process that lays out a specific kind of arrangement' (Nail, 2017: 24). Drawing from Buchanan, a number of parameters are invoked to explain the internal patterns emerging through these arrangements. Each entity in an assemblage can be mapped according to the role it performs, extending from wholly material roles at one pole of a continuum to wholly expressive roles at the other. An assemblage is therefore an ‘entanglement’ of material entities, such as physical bodies, natural resources, locations, technologies; and, expressive entities, such as communication flows, language, signs, cultural systems and non-linguistic impressions (See Buchanan 2021: 113–137; DeLanda, 2006). The material role in the case study is characterised by technological devices; social media traffic; Jeffrey Mitchell’s photograph; journalists covering the poster’s unveiling; the Campaign poster’s creators; the Brežice refugee camp. The expressive role is characterised by the choice of text to interpret the photo (including the words ‘Breaking Point'); the reputation of UKIP; the electoral commission’s rulings; Nigel Farage’s persona; hostility towards refugees; the content of negotiations, social media posts and website content.

In addition to these expressive and material roles there are a further two sets of articulations or roles as characterised by Deleuze and Guattari: territorialising/deterritorialising roles and, coding/decoding roles:

…the distinction between the two articulations is not between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality; therefore each possesses both form and substance (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 41).

The scale of territorialisation or deterritorialisation operating on its component entities refers to the extent to which the assemblage develops a heterogeneous or homogenous range of components. The more an assemblage comprises homogenous entities or homogenises its components, the more the assemblage can be said to be territorialised; the more heterogeneity it encompasses, the more deterritorialisation it manifests. The way the campaign unfolded reflected tensions in these parameters. For example discourses of nostalgia; collaboration between UKIP and Conservative activists; perceived conflicts between “us and them” used to enforce ‘local norms’ or UK workers’ interests, each reflect a tendency of increased territorialisation. However, anti-establishment discourse aimed at realigning values or appeals to broader global opportunities beyond Europe might (initially) reflect greater deterritorialisation.

A degree of coding and decoding operating on its components refers to the way that language is used to establish or transform social identity. Different types of coding can be imposed in different ways. For example, justification based on tradition will be derived from narratives of legitimation or authority, in contrast to technocratic justification, which will employ explanations based on standards, specifications or expertise. National identity, one of the key subjects embedded within the Breaking Point assemblage, is shaped by a state as it extends its coding across the territory. The inhabitants of a state are subject to different types and magnitudes of coding: authoritarian states code much of the behavioural conduct of its inhabitants, both public and private, as illustrated, for example, by Singapore’s prescriptive and draconian penal code. Decoding involves subverting the systems that create fixed meanings and identities. The Breaking Point assemblage codes in ways that aligns subjects with collectives that defines their identity. A crucial way in which language is used to fix identity is in defining authentic and legitimately British people and values, while identifying and defining threats. Such forms of coding often operate via affective circulation; the figure of the ‘asylum seeker’, for example, circulates affective value by adding or transferring negative attributes to (already negatively perceived) archetypes: the economic migrant coming to steal your job; the illegal immigrant maintaining the black economy; the bogus asylum seeker using our sympathy to steal our benefits; the Islamic extremists and foreign criminal hidden among the many, threatening our culture and grooming our women. These figures could be anyone among the set of others, which make such codes particularly powerful themes of propaganda, as Ahmed illustrates in examining projections of hatred: “others threaten to take away from what ‘you’ have, as the legitimate subject of the nation, as the one who is the true recipient of national benefits” (Ahmed, 2004: 2). By contrast, decoding might focus on the condition that most British people are the descendants of migrants, the variety of changing patterns emerging from multiculturalism, the British value of welcoming, etc. Ultimately the Breaking Point campaign demonstrates the efficacy of a particular form of coding.

On Friday 24^th June the result of the referendum – for UK to leave EU – was officially announced; Farage declared that victory had been achieved ‘without a single bullet being fired’ (Saul, 2016). Farage had just played a major role in one of the most significant votes in modern politics. Two years later, he claimed ‘In some ways it [the ad] won us the referendum because it kept us focused on the danger of open borders'. Others were less convinced; Conservative Brexiter, Daniel Hannan, commented: ‘Can you imagine there being an undecided voter who is on the fence, who would be convinced by that poster? Was it actually ever going to switch anyone into the Leave column, or was it about grabbing back the spotlight? The people for whom migration was the top issue were a minority within the Leave voting population. And even among them’. Hannan notes the decline in polls for the Brexit vote in the poster’s immediate aftermath (Shipman, 2016: loc7043).

In the 4 days following the referendum, there was a 57% increase in reported hate crimes. Incidents included: gangs prowling streets demanding passers-by prove they could speak English, Swastikas in numerous cities, assaults, arson attacks, dog excrement thrown at doors or shoved through letter boxes, toddlers racially abused alongside their mothers, a crowd in London chanting ‘First we’ll get the Poles out, then the gays!', a man in Glasgow ripping off a girl’s headscarf telling her ‘trash like you better start obeying the white man’ (Lusher, 2016b).

Tellingly, for such an iconic advertisement, the agency who produced it, Family, have no reference to the campaign on their website. Attempts to contact them yielded an impassioned request to leave them alone; agency workers and their families, it was explained, had been victims of ‘brutal intimidation’. The agency is a pariah in fear of further attention. Mitchell later commented:

The people in the photo have been betrayed by UKIP, rather than me personally. But it has backfired on UKIP. People are very intelligent – they could see this was clearly not a group of people coming to the UK. They aren’t sucked in that easily (Beaumont-Thomas, 2016).

Following a content analysis of media response, Durrheim et al. (2017) report near hegemonic condemnation in mainstream media of the ad’s racism, reporting it as a morality failure that might dupe masses by scaremongering. The authors argue this repeats a familiar process through which right wing rhetoric is mobilized: ‘leaders make controversially racist statements, these statements are met with harsh criticism, and leaders and supporters claim victimization and the rhetorical high ground’ (p. 386). Analysing various discussion forums, they demonstrate this process played out in the aftermath of the UKIP ad; that the adverse reaction bolstered support for the Brexit vote and UKIP’s xenophobic positioning, exactly as the assemblage’s coding and ‘regime of signs’ was designed to perform (see Buchanan, 2021: 137).

Meanwhile the death of people who migrate continues. Hayden reports an average of six people a day died attempting to cross the Mediterranean and double that number estimated to die in the Sahara Dessert en route. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that refugees cannot be returned to Libya because of the risk to their lives there, but the EU circumnavigates the ruling by equipping Libyan coastguards to make interceptions themselves, entailing that people are detained in conditions where ‘executions… torture, rapes, blackmail and abandonment in the desert’ and ‘concentration-camp-like (conditions)’ occur (Hayden, 2022: 82). It is worth juxtaposing this with UKIP’s post-Brexit immigration policy: ‘It is crucially important in order to stem the flow of illegals to totally change their expectations of how they will be treated when they arrive' (UKIP, 2022).

Conclusion

To contextualise the outrage generated by ‘Breaking Point’ is to comprehend this assemblage as a far-reaching and general transformation of political communication as a rise in deliberate misinformation and a deepening culture war that, as Finlayson argues, gives new life to ‘paranoid and conspiratorial thinking from the daft to the wicked and sinister’ (p. 78). By the time of Breaking Point, the public sphere was increasingly dominated by an instrumentalisation of irrational ways of thinking, which we argue is best understood as assemblage. A trope in this emergent landscape is the pleasure of evoking ‘liberal tears’, and the discourse’s exemplar came to be Donald Trump and the vicarious pleasure he provides when he ‘takes down liberals a peg’ (Finlayson, p. 86). Such proponents, of which Farage is clearly one, are typically given to self-dramatisation: ‘individuals who will think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, eschewing what they present as the merely fashionable, or intellectually orthodox, suffering bravely the blows and the persecution of their enemies’ (Finlayson, p. 88). This rhetoric purports to be on the side of civilisation against barbarity in defence of a nation; a nativist discourse that frames the nation as in urgent need of reclamation from established government and elites (see Davies, 2018). By the time of Breaking Point, this global emergence of disparate right-wing populism, if not outright fascism, was ready to deliver a series of ‘political earthquakes’ that have by now substantially de-aligned established political practices and delivered electoral volatility (Davis, 2019 p. 66).

Breaking Point presents a signal moment when we witness an expansion of the radius of the possible by confronting establishment politics with a message that boldly transgressed its pale. Ironically the ad’s mass media form – large billboard and newsprint adverts – was already archaic (see Wheeler, 2015). During Brexit campaigning, Vote Leave engaged Cambridge Analytica to use psychometric data to specifically target users and place inciting messages onto social media feeds, bypassing the possibility of scrutiny and debate (Finlayson, 2018). The Breaking Point billboard ad, in other words, marked the obscene appearance of a hitherto subterranean discourse that lurked in individuals’ Facebook walls and social media feeds; Breaking Point presents the moment when this obscene discourse, at last, was made visible and explicitly imposed onto the political mainstream. Accordingly the coincidence of Cox’s murder with the advertisement was interpreted by many as highly portentous. The ad was clearly being understood as itself marking a Breaking Point of British politics, which arguably have never been reassembled.

Breaking Point implicates consumer culture in the effective mediation of socially corrosive narratives. Rather than silo such discourse into subfields like political communication or political marketing, the assemblage paradigm compels us to recognise the permanent entanglement of consumer culture and political entities that underpin consumption and, in particular, the role consumer culture plays within political practice. Today democracies are being transformed and in many cases subverted by affect laden messaging that allows ‘alternative facts’ to circulate with impunity and deceitful narratives to circumvent traditional restrictions, as exemplified by the Breaking Point assemblage. In this way, our research provides insight into mediation and choice within the consumption of politics in order to enhance an understanding of their role within politics of consumption.