A parody of an advertisement for the Labour Party appeared on Jubilee Line trains yesterday, accusing Israel’s Prime Minister of war crimes.

The parody advert, which featured a picture of the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, displayed the slogan “with Labour Britain is doing deals with war criminals”, along with the Labour logo and the tag #IsraelTradeDeal.

UKLFI has written to Transport for London (TFL) requesting them to remove these obviously fake adverts. Party political adverts are banned on TFL.

UKLFI also pointed out that Netanyahu has not been found to be a war criminal. He is innocent unless proven guilty. Every phrase of every sentence of the allegations made by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Netanya is false, as UKLFI has shown in its letter to the Prosecutor.

Furthermore this advert is defamatory of David Lammy. It also breaches TfL’s advertising guidelines which say an advertisement will be unacceptable if:

(a)  it is likely to cause widespread or serious offence to reasonable members of the public on account of the product or service being advertised, the content or design of the advertisement, or by way of implication. Advertisements which are consistent with TfL’s Public Sector Equality Duty, such as those which promote tolerance, or discourage prejudice, will not however normally be disapproved on the ground that they might cause offence;

(n) it promotes a party political cause or electioneering. Advertisements must conform to TfL’s policy on use of resources, with particular care exercised in pre-election periods;

A UKLFI spokesperson said: “We hope that TfL removes these false parodies immediately and improves its security to prevent them being put up in the first place. If this keeps happening, we can foresee members of the public resorting to self-help to remove unauthorised adverts and potential breakdown of public order”.