If you are thinking of voting to leave the EU, if you want Britain to take back control, if you believe the Brussels oligarchs are throttling our democracy, and, yes, if you think immigration has to be regulated and that can best be done if we have proper national borders again, look at this poster, for it is very informative.

A crowd is flowing towards us. Face after face, an apparently unending human tide. The nearest faces are in sharp focus, the furthest a blur of strangers. They are not just strangers but they are, perhaps, alien. For this poster makes plain what is commonly fudged in all the heated talk about free movement within the EU. The long snaking line seems to deliberately quote the queue of unemployed people in the famous Labour Isn’t Working poster in 1979.

Nigel Farage has been photographed in front of this new poster from Ukip, released a week before the referendum, and he’s not messing around. His party’s poster tells it like it is. This vote is not just about Polish foods having their own shelves at Tesco or Italians working in Caffè Nero. Farage’s poster boldly draws attention to the collision of two things: the principle of free movement within the EU, and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

The photograph shows refugees in Slovenia in 2015, many fleeing a murderous civil war in Syria. Well, that’s the story behind it, but this poster is not telling a complicated backstory. It is graphically emotional, as only visual images can be. It portrays an oncoming tide of outsiders at our gate – and they are not European faces. To put it more bluntly they are not white faces.

Your new poster resembles outright Nazi propaganda, @Nigel_Farage. Thanks to @brendanjharkin for pointing it out. pic.twitter.com/Rd89XZSvfD — Connor Beaton (@zcbeaton) June 16, 2016

Offended? You should be, because with this picture and its huge caption –“BREAKING POINT” – Farage gives the lie to the claim that his concerns about immigration are in no way connected to racism. That’s not to say that it’s racist to worry about immigration, but rather that Ukip’s poster is in effect saying it is. This truly nasty image claims Brexit on behalf of racists and it reveals what they will be boasting the morning after a leave vote.

If you are indeed concerned about our ability to control our borders and yet are horrified by racism, please keep looking at those faces. The way they are being used shows that some of the people you will be siding with next week really do think the immigration issue is a race issue. And they want it to be just that.

This poster is the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, which ended his mainstream political career in 1968. In the speech Powell sided with a constituent who told him excessive immigration was destroying Britain:

“What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre …”

I don’t think this Ukip poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison

Powell foresaw an unchecked inflow of black immigrants creating civil war; this poster tells us absolutely the same thing about the people headed our way, it claims, across borderless Europe. This tide of faces summons up exactly the same swarms and rivers and hordes of otherness and racial difference that Powell spoke against in 1968 and that so many have tried to evoke since – the National Front and the BNP among them. I don’t think this Ukip poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison.

But look behind these faces, into the minds of the people who created the poster, and you will find those who assume we all share their unease with racial diversity. Do the great and generous British people that fought against the Nazi creed of race hate really want to give such types their day of triumph?