As the election race tightens, a series of anti-Tory subvertising posters have started appearing on bus stops and tube trains around London.
The posters were designed by satirical artist Darren Cullen best known for his ‘Pocket Money Loans’ installation at Banksy’s Dismaland. Cullen designed the images a fortnight ago and made them available to download on social media and his website.
Since then, citizens across the capital have taken them to the streets to clandestinely install hundreds of the satirical anti-Conservative polemics in high profile advertising spaces.
One poster, designed to look like an official Conservative party election advert, says “We’re not shooting the sick and disabled in the street, but it gets the same results”, a reference to the 9,850 sick or disabled people who died shortly after being declared fit for work or placed on a work-related activity group thanks to the Conservatives outsourced work-capability assessments.
Another of the ads claims that “Theresa May Would Follow Donald Trump to the End of the World”, with an image of the two right-wing leaders hand-in-hand next to a nuclear mushroom cloud. Cullen points to Theresa May’s closeness to Trump as tying Britain to a “nuclear suicide pact” with an unhinged President. “Theresa May’s cynical friendship with that awful man commits British soldiers to die in Trump’s inevitably disastrous wars.” says Cullen.
Another poster repaints the Conservative Party’s oak tree logo as a nuclear mushroom cloud over London, with the text “Our Plan for Britain”. A reference, says Cullen, to the Conservatives policy of nuclear first-use in a conventional conflict, which could lead to all-out nuclear war.
Two more posters call Jeremy Hunt and Iain Duncan Smith “UNELECTABLE” over their record on the NHS and benefits sanctions. Highlighting Jeremy Hunt’s mismanagement of the NHS, the poster accuses Hunt of starving the health service of funds until it can be fully privatised.
Cullen says he is grateful to see the word getting out and, while he can’t condone potentially illegal behaviour, he does support the subvertising movement. He originally made the files available at toriesout.co.uk so that people could print at home or work.
The artist has also crowdfunded money to have 20,000 leaflets printed and sent to marginal seats. They fold out to show a corrupted Tory Windows XP operating system crashing under the strain of Conservative policies. A reference to the recent NHS debilitating cyber-attack, the “extensive warnings” of which were ignored by Jeremy Hunt.
