Ed Miliband has described as “objectionable and totally wrong” a Nottingham Labour councillor sharing an image of the Conservative party’s latest election poster doctored to feature a Nazi concentration camp.
Rosemary Healy, a councillor for the Mapperley Ward, was suspended on Tuesday after retweeting the image, which shows the Tory election poster doctored to show railway tracks into Auschwitz instead of the original image of a straight country road.
This is the tweet Healy retweeted:
The new Tory campaign poster featuring a German road's a bit controversial: pic.twitter.com/Qr4p4qkZmW
— Tom Pride (@ThomasPride) January 4, 2015
This is the Conservative party’s original poster:
Share our poster to let friends know about the important choice facing Britain this year: http://t.co/bFxWCtaq9U pic.twitter.com/cBBY1T28TN
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) January 2, 2015
Healy deleted the retweet shortly afterwards and tweeted an apology before later deleting her account. She said she had not realised what the photograph depicted, tweeting: “Profound apologies for that retweet which was a genuine mistake and would never have been retweeted had I recognised it for what it was.”
Speaking at the first of his People’s Question Time events in Hucknall in Nottinghamshire on Thursday – one of 4m conversations he has promised to have with people across the country before the general election – the Labour party leader said the incident should be investigated and that he supported the suspension of the councillor.
The image was created by political blogger Thomas Pride, who first used it with the comment: “The new Tory campaign poster featuring a German road’s a bit controversial”, poking fun at the fact that the image on the original election poster was discovered to be of road in Germany.
This tweet shows the Conservative poster alongside the source image of a road in Germany:
That Tory poster showing the road to recovery? We contacted the photographer, he says it runs through Germany #c4news pic.twitter.com/iRQ8IDTOmJ
— Brian Whelan (@brianwhelanhack) January 3, 2015
In May last year Oxford Labour councillor Mark Cherry received complaints after he appeared to tweet a photograph of Auschwitz, comparing the government’s housing and employment policy to conditions inside Nazi concentration camps. Cherry told the Oxford Mail that his account had been hacked.
