London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time(reclaimthenet.org) |
London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time(reclaimthenet.org) |
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.
Precisely. So why exactly did they deploy so much of it when they had no way of using it? This isn't new, it's been the case since like 2005 that people walking around London generate more CCTV footage time than real time.
There was another farce when they had that second round of attempted bombings on the Underground and despite having very clear video of it happening they absolutely struggled to deal with it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_attempted_... "described by the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair as "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the Met"), leading to the whole shooting of the Brazilian at Stockwell incident.
All this surveillance demonstrably isn't a deterrent to actual criminals or would be terrorists in the slightest.
Even if the people who are putting all of this surveillance in place genuinely do want to do good, the surveillance will still be in place if someone less scrupulous gains power
The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.
So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.
*has already turned into a dystopian hell hole FTFY
At least China has more good weather
> But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.
Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!
And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/german...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-administration-argues-it-ca...
The cards seem to accept cash
Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.
You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.
I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.
Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.
Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.
Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?
Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:
> Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.
The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.
https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
Why? How does that benefit society?
At what point do you allow intervention? After they've destroyed £x,000 of property? After people are assaulted? How are you proposing police get deployed safely in those circumstances with 10s of thousands of protesters/rioters in the streets?
Don't you think maintaining law& order is a necessary activity of the state in a democracy?
You can't seriously think we should stand back and give over or streets to whoever can be most violent?
To address it though, I think we are in a bad situation when widespread violence is even a risk; it indicates that civic pride has completely broken down.
I don’t know what the answer would be in that situation, and I’m not proposing a solution to it. (I’m not sure we’re there quite yet either)
More important than people trusting authority is authority trusting the people. The more trust in a society, the less ‘law and order’ needs to be handled by structures external to the social mass.
Because then (when mass protests are simply ignored) the "Russian disinformation" about UK not being precisely a "democracy" suddenly starts looking true?
If you have no protests, it means that the public is ok with what the government is doing. In a democracy (whatever one understands by it) that is.
My question is, what is the reason that more restrictions on protest are being brought in now specifically (ever since the Extinction Rebellion protests); is there a deeper motive. If there is, I don’t know what it would be.
The implication of police state is that they care about crime, but they do not care about crime. Anyone can turn up in Britain, claim asylum and will be sent to a hotel closed down for their comfort. Many visas were denied for speakers at this protest.
It is a politician state, not a police state. Facial recognition is being deployed against political opponents, not criminals.
I mean its not. Plus with the court backlogs rising, the chances of you getting convicted are rapidly diminishing
Well, I guess they'll have to raise the custody time limits to something more reasonable then, like a year or so. I mean, as long as you get a trial eventually, this is fine, right?
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.Somehow I don't think Tommy Robinson would take such an approach to say the classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization by the UK government though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action#Proscription_...
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
Robinson has organised 4 London rallies in recent years and this is the second Unite The Kingdom rally. So what makes you think this will be the one which turns violent?
It's basically families listening to speakers on a stage.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/13/unite-the-ki...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/23/police-clash...
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said officers had "policed without fear or favour", knowing it would be challenging.
"There is no doubt that many came to exercise their lawful right to protest, but there were many who came intent on violence."
Assistant Commissioner Twist said officers had suffered broken teeth, concussion, a prolapsed disc, a head injury and a possible broken nose.
For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)
That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.
A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
> 37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions
> Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.
> Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.
> Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.
These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.
The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.
> The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement.
The bureaucratic solution to situations like the Arena bombing is to remove human judgment and replace it with 4k video analytics. The technology already exists. I don't like it either but if there is ever a way to remove decision making power from a person by means of technology or process, the bureaucracy will gleefully use it.
That's a very poor read. Most of these look like breaches of previous conviction release terms. Failure to appear isn't a non-issue. It's a bail skip to dodge a conviction.
I'll agree they're not fresh murders, but if you don't enforce the terms of a release on licence, it makes it a joke, and more importantly puts the public at risk.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
>> These are all pretty low-hanging fruit.
>> This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans.
You listed voyeurism and RAPE. I'll take one less rapist on the streets thank you very much.
No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.
I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.
However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.
Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
Robinson is gutter racism. Farage is trying to be its respectable face.
There's your answer.
What you need is something like being able to search all of the cameras from a wide area which contain a bike and x color hoodie so you can follow the person back to some other location that identifies them further. This is the part that's missing in most cities. It could be done manually, and it would be if it was a very serious crime like terrorism, but for normal theft it isn't worth the time. The tech does exist now though.
1. The odds of the actual bike itself being covered by CCTV during the theft is pretty slim. Nearby? Sure, but probably not recording the offence. Then unless you're got a precise time window/know where the thief went, you're stuck watching hours of footage hoping to spot the right bike.
2. Even if you do get a clear, high quality facial picture of the thief, you have no magic way of figuring out who that is. You essentially email it to all the local cops and hope someone's recognises them.
The result is your bike theft turns into quite a big investigate, with a sub 5% likelihood of a position outcome.
If they turned violent, or deliberately intimidated people, then yes.
Under UK law if they said certain things that are considered hate speech laws, then again yes.
There are also laws around protests (where and when, legal mechanisms of bans, orders banning particular individuals from particular actions) so if anyone breached those, again, yes.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/ways-to-pay/where-to-buy-tickets-an...
If you can buy and use with cash, then it isn't.
There's a reason you choose to do this during a political protest.
Also, you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts for some reason? Do you think that they are justified because he, and the people who join him, will be publicly avoiding taxes and bookies?
edit: It's also important to note that in the 15th year of future Reform rule, when a "reformed" Tommy Robinson is appointed Home Secretary, he will entirely support drones doing facial recognition during protests. How else are you supposed to catch the anti-Semites?
Sure. But this isn't an absolute right. To be trivial, you don't have the right to do fraud in public without being recorded by the police.
I'm saying for a convicted violent criminal, particularly one with a history of inciting violence, I think there is a place where a reasonable line could exist.
> you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts
Where did I do this?
I don't think it is, for many reasons. One is most "violent convictions" are in fact bullshit; at least here in France it's very common to get condemned for violence against officers of the law (« violences sur PDAP ») despite ample video evidence of the contrary (i.e. being assaulted by the cops).
Another one is unlike protective measures against harassment and in-person violence, which are meant to keep a person's physical/mental peace, who do we protect by pre-preventing someone from protesting? If a person effectively assaults someone, then let them get condemned for that crime. How is it acceptable for an administration to decide that someone is going to commit a crime in the future?
Likewise, facial recognition is wrong for many reasons. Not only because it's many times wrong in its assessments, making innocent people face severe consequences. But also because in the cases when it's right, it's gonna be used against do-gooders, just like every power given to the State.
Two examples from here in France: the laws about dissolving non-profits were invented in the 30s against fascist militias, however in the next years (even before the war) they were used against anti-colonial/anti-racist leagues. They've been used again lately against ecological and antifascist groups. Likewise, the laws about "associations de malfaiteurs" designed to help combat the mafia have in fact been used and abused to imprison activist groups.
In the US, the constitutional amendment banning slavery makes an exception for people in prison; you can guess who gets imprisoned. I've read (can't confirm) that in the 1970s, Nixon's criminalization marijuana was intended for oppressing black people and left-wingers, who were the predominant users of it. Since then the US has used mass incarceration, partly a result of that War on Drugs policy. Also, long post-release probation periods are also used to control people; look up the rapper Meek Mill, for example. Most recently, authorities in many countries have found many reasons to arrest left-wing protestors such as pro-Palestinian activists, sometimes applying very serious charges.
I'm not writing here in favor of the causes Tommy Robinson, Reform UK, left-wingers, or pro-Palestinian protestors. I'm writing about freedom; we've long known that if you can take it from some, you can take it from anybody.
How do you allow the surveillance of the entire Tommy Robinson protest, or even just Robinson, and yet protect freedom? Are our freedoms lost forever if we are convicted once?
It's best to state statements and leave the questions for queries.
That’s very common, yes.
So there isn't any problem, in the abstract, with some sex offenders wandering the streets.
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
well, I guess you can always try moving there. It's my suspicion that more people move from China to the UK than the other way around. Why is that? Maybe they haven't heard the news about it being a terrible place.
I get it though. As other posters have said, various British police forces seem to get ahead of themselves and then have to climb back off their hill when confronted with skeptical press [remind me, do you get much skeptical press in China?] and although I do not greatly care for the marchers who carry pictures of ultralights (because yeah! Kill civilians!!) I don't think the people who are nearby and telling us that bombing civilians is wrong (hint: bombing civilians is wrong) should be penalized for doing so. The courts and the electorate will have their say, and (slowly) grind any disagreeing gov't into a policy change. As it should be.
That said, while I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement, I can't because, well, because it's stupid. It's a stupid thing to say. You should reflect more before you type.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/11/met-police-mak...
People are arrested for holding placards that do not even mention the banned group.
It's important to mention that the seemingly unlawful ban was imposed after the group broke into the airbase and spray-painted planes.
Prime minister Keir Starmer was called a hypocrite for calling for the ban, because he was defending an activist in court after they committed pretty much identical act 20 years ago in the airbase Fairford while acting as a human rights lawyer.
Arresting a person yelling "not my king!"
Proscibing a group protesting genocide while openly supporting the genocide. Later the ban was overturned by the court, but the government appealed and the police keeps throwing people in jail for wearing "I oppose genocide"
Arresting and prosecuting the grandma for holding a placard quoting text visible on the wall of the criminal court (old Baileys).
Arresting a man wearing "I support PLASTICINE action" (that's not a typo).
Throwing in jail people sitting on the zoom call and discussing nonviolent, peaceful protest against the environment collapse and the governments role in accelerating it.
Forbiding people from explaining to juries WHY they decided to break the law (as with the law, not all law is fair: slavery was legal, outing Jews to Nazis was mandatory, child marriages were legal)
Asking a neuroscientist to verify harms of the commonly abused substances, firing him for proving alcohol and tobacco are MUCH more deadly and harmful than some of the banned substances. At the same time the government claims there are no medicinal benefits of cannabis , Britain is the home to the biggest cannabis plantation, run by government-connected people. Yield is sold to be processed into Sativex, medical cannabis.
I could go on for hours.
I assume the £5m did not come with similar strings attached.
The Green Party is now a lot more racist. Have you not read of the comments coming out of people withing the party, particularly its newly elected local councillors?
IMO Labour are more subtle, but are as racist as Reform. They use race to attack politicians in other parties - they portray non-white Conservatives as race traitors, for example. They have a white saviour outlook, and stereotype and condescend us poor inferior groups: remember the Labour MP who said James Cleverly was not properly black because his family are affluent.
While Reform technically didn't exist at the time Farage had his "Breaking Point" poster and all it echoed from the mid 1900s, Farage was very much responsible for it and he literally owned Reform until very recently.
There are also smaller groups that are worse: Restore and the EDL.
My real problem is with people who equate Reform with racism which is dangerous for two reasons. It gives racists on the "left" a free pass, and it ignores smaller but nasty groups on the "right". My biggest concerns are the Greens (who are likely to win a lot of sears in the next parliament), antisemitic independents, and Restore Britain who won all the seats the stood for (albeit in the same area) in the recent local government elections.
Also an underlying attitude that it is OK to be racist about some particular group, or people in the wrong political parties.
The same one that threatening concentration camps in areas that don't vote for them? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c362e9p385yo
Farage is not the most extreme in his party. Sadly.
I would gently point out that if the immigration system worked like it used to, then we wouldn't need large amounts of detention centres. For two years it was illegal to process asylum claims. This meant that the backlog stacked up, costing a fuck tonne of cash.
More egregiously instead of sorting the problem. Various Home secretaries chose politics rather than building systems to track and efficiently process claims.
Detention centres are a massive sign of failure. I don't want them anywhere, I want my money to be spent on sorting the problem not showboating how cruel we are to people we don't like. (Which I would point out is directly against biblical teachings)
Interesting that your example of the dangerous racist extremist is a brown Muslim.
Also interesting I got downvoted for a true purely factual comment. Says something about the people doing it.
Odd way to say you've never been to london.
At least Farage/Yaxley and their hangers-on are clearly on the make.
You mean, of course, sprayed paint into the turbines of military planes, causing a £million plus in damages. It's certainly not behaviour that a government can allow to continue.
Maybe people don't understand the job a lawyer has? I'm assuming people here aren't as ignorant as to assume a) a lawyer supports the activity of the accused they defended, b) a PM can support actions seeking to damage infrastructure of the country they represent whether they personally might have in the past or not.
Palestine Action have acted like a terror group. Weakly, compared to those we've seen act in the UK, I'd accept. Israeli action against Palestinians has been reprehensible. Calling for genocide of Israelis is still not okay.
People decided to make it about supporting a censured group, and attacking Israelis (and Jews in particular) rather than protesting for an end to violence. It seems none of those people called for Hamas to return the people they kidnapped - any pretence of wanting peace fails right there.
Hamas got what they wanted, I guess. Such evil.
Which politicians do you expect to follow Biblical teachings? As far as I can see all of the main are fundamentally opposed to Biblical teachings. Which politician can you imagine giving all they have to the poor, for example :)
> Various Home secretaries chose politics rather than building systems to track and efficiently process claims.
That is true. The system is a complete mess, highly inefficient, and ineffective in accurately assessing claims.
> Can you please explain to me how you managed to divine my preference for immigrants from my post
Maybe not you, but as I said in another comment it has made it awkward for some - the Green party in particular have been made to look hypocritical.
His last protest was in september, it was pretty violent. 26 police officers were injured.
Tommy robison has the advantage here in that its not illegal to express public support for him and his march, unlike palestine action where its very much illegal to do so (hence why there are >2000 arrests)
> they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators"
if this is a march for uniting the british realm why would he need foreigners to speak? Last time Musk incited violent overthrow of the UK government. Which is rich coming from a fucking Afrikaner.
> we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
Nice I see what you did there. Everyone immigrant is a terrorist. Look, if people turn up illegally, then its fair to process them fairly and return. There is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is changing the law so its impossible to do that, unless we pay £300k a year to send 4000 people to an african country. yes, just 4k people, not a year, total.
The biggest issue facing the UK is that we have not had a working government since 2007.
We also have foreigners people paying people £300 to fire bomb ambulance stations. Its almost like theres a vested interest in fomenting unrest...
Given the number of people involved, that is a pretty low level of violence.
> unlike palestine action where its very much illegal to do so (hence why there are >2000 arrests)
Specifically the arrests were for supporting a group banned as a terrorist group. I am opposed to that law, but its important to be clear why they were arrested.
> if this is a march for uniting the british realm why would he need foreigners to speak
More fundamentally, visas are issued at the discretion of the government. I can think of people with far better cases for entering the country who have been refused visas - for example, academics attending conferences. I wonder how many of the people protesting about these 11 people getting visas were upset about those?
> unless we pay £300k a year to send 4000 people to an african country. yes, just 4k people, not a year, total.
That is just £75 a year per person. it is a LOT cheaper than keeping them in the UK. I think they get something like £50/week if not in catered accommodation.
> Look, if people turn up illegally, then its fair to process them fairly and return. There is nothing wrong with that
What is wrong with the current process is that it is slow and inefficient. There is also a problem with what to do with those who do not have documents as its hard to return them without evidence of where they should be returned to.
It is also grossly unfair as it actually lets in a lot of people who have no real claim while a lot of people who are genuine refugees cannot get here: look at the ratio of people belonging to religious minorities vs majority from Iraq or Syria. In 2025 there were over 2k asylum claims from Sri Lankans, a safe country (the civil war is long over). There are a lot of other countries I am sceptical about but do not have the same direct knowledge of. Why not send people who are clearly from a safe country back immediately?
> The biggest issue facing the UK is that we have not had a working government since 2007
I think that is optimistic. I would put the date a lot earlier!
I was of that opinion, alas it was not £300k for 4000, it was £300k _per_ person. double checking again to make sure I am not talking bollocks the spread is 100k-450k per person depending on how you calculate (ie total cost or ignoring upper bounds on people being processed)
the NAO says it was expensive: https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/the-costs-of-the-uk-rw... Migrant observatory says more expensive: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries...
Its was an exceedingly badly designed policy, that meant that it was illegal to process any asylum claims outside of sending people to rwanda. So the actual cost is even higher, because we had to find a fuck tonne of temporary accommodation. Even worse was that we were sending people who were granted asylum to rwanda, not people who failed.
It prioritised optics over solving the problem.
hence my anger.
> Why not send people who are clearly from a safe country back immediately?
because it was illegal to process any claims until the Rwanda scheme was up and running. At its height, there could only be 4000 people processed.
My friend, I think we both want the same thing, We want fair and legal processing of migrants. We want to make sure that those in need are offered compassion and care, those that take the piss, sent packing.
An entire class of commentator and politician decided that performance was more important than delivery, and we end up where we are. The _most_ annoying thing is that it drives a wedge between people who would otherwise normally agree.
People outside the UK have been banned from attending because they are "agitators". The reason why Palestine Action is illegal is because they organized terrorist attacks, this protest is not illegal and one of the pro-Palestine groups attending is the largest donor to Labour.
Why would foreigners not be allowed to speak? Britain is a diverse melting pot where all peoples can discuss ideas freely. Petty nationalism and xenophobia isn't welcome here.
I didn't mention anything about every immigrant. I am saying that undocumented people have entered the country and carried our terrorist attacks. It isn't impossible to fix this, Labour changed the laws to push people back aggressively in 2004 (iirc, it was before the GE). What has changed is the electoral makeup of the UK, there is a massive constituency for as many illegal immigrants as possible. That is fomenting unrest because it involves massive social and cultural change in order to make up for the fact that Labour's support collapsed amongst their core vote. This isn't a complex or unusual situation: these things are happening because people are heavily incentivised. Changing the law is "wrong"...of course, you wonder why we have't had a working government at the same time? Lol. If any of this stuff was actually fixed, it would be very bad for political parties.
https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
And btw, yes it is possible the Met are lying. There have been multiple FOIs in the recent past where police forces have lied about this kind of thing. Aston Villa policing being one of the most obvious examples. It isn't particularly relevant to this case though but, given the massive changes in policing over the last few decades, it is generally wise to be cautious. This is why the IOPC exists and has been so critical of the Met.
With regard to sending people back to safe countries immediately, I do not mean as part of the Rwanda scheme, but in general. i.e. if someone from a country that is known to be safe claims asylum why not just immediately refuse them?
I agree what the vast majority of people want is a fair and efficient system. I think there are two things going on as well as the focus on optics rather than reality. One is that politicians contempt for the hoi polloi is such that they interpret any opposition to immigration as racist. The reality is that it is a lot more nuanced and most people are opposed to some immigration, not all immigration (e.g. skilled vs unskilled, legal vs illegal, etc.). The current government is very proud of having reduced immigration by reducing the number of skilled workers and students entering the country! The other thing is that it is a useful distraction from other issues and a scapegoat.
The reason it "cost" so much is because it was never used. You have confused stack with a flow. Basic error. In addition, the expectation was that it would be a deterrent because people are coming here primarily for economic reasons. The reason the government believed this to be the case is because the same thing has been tried in other countries and worked, Australia did this and now (in a turn of events that will presumably shock you) people are complaining that the cost of the deterrent is too large...because no-one tries to get there by boat anymore.
We have to find temporary accommodation anyway. Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy, I am not sure how anyone could think otherwise. It is enshrined in our law functionally: if someone comes here illegally, we have to house them in a hotel and then we have to provide them with a council house if their claim is successful.
One of the bills, theoretically, created the legal basis to detain anyone who comes to the UK by irregular means. However, and despite the usual noisy crowd saying it was the end of democracy, there is no functional capacity within the Home Office to effectuate this...quite simply, there is isn't the administrative capacity (or, with Labour, the political will). This power exists and is completely unused. We are also unable to return people which makes indefinite detention of 300-400k people at a minimum challenging.
But this act is used to detain some illegal migrants in prison in some cases. Usually this is terrorism-related but, I believe, this has also been used in the many cases of sexual assault.
It was not illegal to process claims whilst the Rwanda scheme was running. One, it was never started, it was due to start after the last election if the Tories ran. Two, it did not change the status of people arriving, the Tories put substantial resources into the Home Office to reduce the backlog (one of the issues here is productivity because so many claims are accepted and there is a large industry dedicated to helping claimants, average processing time is 14 days...it is very slow).
Labour policy is to create a wedge because, to be frank, reducing immigration is devastating for a party that relies so heavily on voters who feel a kinship with the vast majority of illegal migrants. In some areas, Labour majority is almost all this demographic, and almost all illegal migrants make up this same demographic. We are speeding down the path to balkanization, this happened under the last Labour government and has happened under this one. There is a long historical record here of this happening in other countries that people are determined to ignore. One of the reasons why Labour went for student visas immediately, in addition to the massive level of fraud, is because people from these countries do not vote for Labour in the UK. Leaving Pakistan off the list, when it is a country that also does not accept returns and has huge number of fraudulent student visa was very obvious (and btw, some UK unis no longer accept students from Pakistant because of the fraud...this is exceptional). That is the wedge.
You cannot get asylum on economic grounds.
> Australia did this
And it didn't work. They spent $12 billion(aussie dollars) on ~4000 people. which is a pointless waste of cash, even more so when they had to evacuate those granted asylum back to aus because they were so badly looked after.
> We have to find temporary accommodation anyway. Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy,
Correct, but temporary accommodation is >>£ than normal accommodation. If you can't progress a claim because the destination is blocked, then you need more temporary accommodation. The crucial thing is, when your claim is processing, you can't work, which means we have to pay for everything.
Once the claim is processed and they have asylum, they can work, which means we don't need to pay anywhere near as much to look after them.
> But this act is used to detain some illegal migrants in prison in some cases. Usually this is terrorism-related but, I believe, this has also been used in the many cases of sexual assault.
No this is just the law. anyone who commits those acts are meant to be in jail, because it's illegal. thats how the law works.
> detain anyone who comes to the UK by irregular means.
What the bill actually does is make it almost impossible to claim asylum in a catch 22 style. Basically if you come here any any means, with the intention of claiming asylum, it invalidates any visa you may have. This means your entry in the UK was illegal. So there are no legal routes to claim asylum out side of the two special schemes for ukrainains and Hong Kongers.
the problem is, because they didn't do the ground work that would remove the contradicting laws. Which means its not really possible to defend it in court.
> Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy, I am not sure how anyone could think otherwise
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/illegal-migration-dealing...
Basically because it was illegal to send people to anywhere other than rwanda, and rwanda was ready, and wasn't legal to send anyone to for processing, it meant that no-one could be processed. This was a known and telegraphed problem of the bill. This act: https://www.legal500.com/developments/thought-leadership/ill... made it legal to process claims again.
> the Tories put substantial resources into the Home Office
Yes, and it was spent on accommodation and rwanda.
> We are speeding down the path to balkanization,
No, we really are not. Go to Rotterdam and look at how integration happens there (hint, it fucking doesnt) In Britain we do integration really well. kids of immigrants have excellent outcomes in education and employment. For example out of the last 8 years there has only been 4 months where someone who isnt a child of a migrant held the top spot (6 out of 8)
> Labour went for student visas immediately,
Actually the tories did that first. The best part? now we have to pay more to bail out universities.
> There is a long historical record here of this happening in other countries that people are determined to ignore.
What record is that?