A UK Protest First

Saturday saw two rival protests take place in London - a "pro-Palestine" demonstration and the “Unite the Kingdom” march. While both gatherings are arguably rooted in competing forms of collectivism, not everyone attending Tommy Robinson’s march was a far-right thug, nor was everyone at the opposing demonstration a raging anti-semite - though you wouldn’t necessarily know it given the vitriol spewing from both sides across traditional and social media.

The news here is not the protests themselves - which passed largely peacefully. History was in fact made by the fact that this Saturday saw the first time facial recognition surveillance was used by a British police force at a protest. These were also the first large-scale demonstrations to take place after the diktats of the Crime and Policing Bill came into force in April, which, amongst other restrictions, empowers police to enforce the removal of face coverings at protests. It is telling that the state wasted no time in banning face coverings, only to immediately deploy facial recognition technology to scan the unmasked crowds.

Since facial recognition surveillance works by comparing the faces of all scanned to a list of known criminal suspects, it is nothing less than the digital equivalent of a mandatory police line-up. The only difference being that in a traditional line-up there is usually reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing before they are subjected to police scrutiny. Use of this Orwellian technology at protests therefore amounts to the de-facto criminalisation of public gatherings.

The BBC claims that the operation to keep the rival groups apart was "to maintain the principle of freedom of speech - that people should be allowed to express their political views, so long as hate speech laws are not broken.” While Britons are by now accustomed to the State peddling the contradiction that qualified speech somehow still constitutes free speech, the idea that facial recognition surveillance can itself be a tool for protecting liberty marks a new low in authoritarian doublethink.

While political discourse in the UK is becoming increasingly polarised, authoritarians in Westminster rub their hands with growing satisfaction at the sight of division and disorder. Every clash, every outrage cycle, and every eruption of public tension becomes another justification for expanded surveillance powers, harsher speech restrictions, and greater state control over public life. Left or right, our true fight is with those who would restrict our right to debate, dissent, and disagree. Freedom of assembly must never be conditional upon submission to state-mandated dress codes or the indignity of facial recognition surveillance.