The Telegraph picks up the story
Fame at last!
‘British pensioners’ on BNP election leaflet are actually Italian models
Pamphlets being distributed by the far right party to 29 million homes ahead of next month’s poll European and council polls feature testimonies from five “typical Britons”, giving their reasons for voting BNP.
The endorsements from apparently respectable members of society – including a soldier, doctor, and young mother – reflect the party’s attempt to appeal to mainstream voters.
But far from depicting proud BNP supporters, the images are actually stock photos from online picture libraries that have been used by dozens of websites to promote everything from painkillers to caravans.
On the leaflet, the elderly couple are quoted complaining that hard-working Britons are being “pushed to the back of the queue by bogus asylum seekers”.
But last night Italian photographer Luca Di Filippo confirmed that the people in the photo were actually his parents, who had only ever visited this country as tourists and do not share the views of the BNP.
The disclosure sits uncomfortably with the party’s campaign slogan “British jobs for British workers”.
Mr Di Filippo, who is now based in London, said he was astonished to see images of his mother and father being used to promote an extreme right wing party.
“I did not think they would be allowed to use a royalty-free image for political purposes. I’m really, really upset,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“If the BNP had been open about what they were doing and asked me directly I would have said ‘no thank you’.”
…
The rest of the article talks about The Straight Choice website and the blogger who uncovered the story, but we know about that half already, so there’s no need to reproduce it.
Meanwhile: There appears to be an issue with uploading leaflets at the moment [from IE on Vista], with the error:
Sorry, your image needs to be in jpeg/jpg format” coming up
Apologies for the inconvenience. This will probably get done on Monday as people are running away for the weekend.
Update: The bug was due to crappy Micro$oft using their totally fictional and non-standard “image/pjpeg” uploaded file setting, as discussed here. As usual, the rest of us have to work around it, as you can see on line 58 of function.fetch.php