Sunday, January 04, 2015
The road to Weimar
The Tories have once more managed to turn triumph into disaster as their latest poster campaign backfired spectacularly.
At first it was thought that the erroneous claim on the poster that the deficit has been halved would deal the killer blow but those analysing the image on the internet and in the media found a far more satisfying flaw - the picture of a road decisively drawing us towards the promised land is not an image of anywhere in Britain, rather it is a manipulated stock photo of a road in Germany.
And, as if to underline the feeling that we have all been deceived, the photograph has been photo-shopped so as to remove all the cracks and potholes from the road surface, a metaphor for political advertising if ever I saw one.
It gets better. As the Times points out, the image, taken by German photographer Alexander Burzik in 2008, is of a rural road near Weimar. This immediately invites comparisons to the economic disaster that was the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, not the message that the Tories wanted to convey.
At first it was thought that the erroneous claim on the poster that the deficit has been halved would deal the killer blow but those analysing the image on the internet and in the media found a far more satisfying flaw - the picture of a road decisively drawing us towards the promised land is not an image of anywhere in Britain, rather it is a manipulated stock photo of a road in Germany.
And, as if to underline the feeling that we have all been deceived, the photograph has been photo-shopped so as to remove all the cracks and potholes from the road surface, a metaphor for political advertising if ever I saw one.
It gets better. As the Times points out, the image, taken by German photographer Alexander Burzik in 2008, is of a rural road near Weimar. This immediately invites comparisons to the economic disaster that was the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, not the message that the Tories wanted to convey.
