Britain: forward, not back

Britain: forward, not back. So states The Labour Party slogan for the upcoming election in the UK. I’ve added some punctuation to make it read okay in text, but I still have a problem with it. Surely the opposite of "forward" is "backward". Otherwise it ought to read Britain: front, not back, which I don’t think has any point at all. The Sunday Times also points out that the slogan may have been lifted from an episode of The Simpsons, in which a cartoon Bill Clinton makes his twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom speech. They might have done a little better.