Violent protests across Britain—triggered by the killing of three young girls and injury to eight other children and two adults in a violent knife attack in Southport last week—have prompted the newly installed Labour prime minister to consider a range of authoritarian measures.
After Monday’s emergency (‘Cobra’) meeting, Starmer told the media that he was considering additional measures, including the creation of a “standing army” of specialist law enforcement officers able to be deployed across the UK, ramp up criminal justice, and identifying and naming participants in protests as quickly as possible. Criminal law applies online as well as offline, the PM said, “and I am assured that’s the approach that is being taken.” He added,
This is not protest. It is pure violence, and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities, so the full force of the law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part in these activities.
Sir Keir Starmer announced on Thursday last week that the authorities are looking into how they can “deploy facial recognition technology … more widely across the country.” Civil liberties campaigners have long criticised the rolling out of facial recognition surveillance cameras, which take ‘faceprints’ of millions of people. The Big Brother Watch campaigning organisation said today, on August 5th, that “these are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications.”
👁️PM wants to EXPAND facial recognition use in the UK- meanwhile this tech is largely banned in the EU
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) August 5, 2024
“These are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications.” – @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️https://t.co/CiL2Jad5te
There has also been much discussion over the weekend about the possibility of proscribing the English Defence League—which voices both on the Right and the Left agree has effectively ceased to exist—as terrorist, and about how social media companies can ‘do more’ to ‘tackle’ ‘disinformation.’
Academy of Ideas director Baroness (Claire) Fox responded to Starmer’s statements by claiming “the only [presented] solutions to the horrifying events in Southport are more bans and censorship [which] is more likely to fuel new depths of anger and resentment—far more than any hard-right memes.”
It will also give far more glamour and credit to the decrepit EDL by pretending it is they—and only they—who are responsible for the febrile mood of betrayal felt by millions, let down by the Westminster bubble, regardless of which party is in power.›
Writing in Spiked Online, Tom Slater added that “the direction of travel is undeniable.”
It’s now clear that our fundamental freedoms mean even less to this government than they did to its predecessor.
More than 100 arrests were made at one protest alone in Whitehall—the home of the British government—on Wednesday. Over the weekend, a hotel used to house asylum seekers in Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, was set ablaze, and another was targeted in Tamworth, Staffordshire.
The Daily Telegraph also reports that in Bolton, Greater Manchester, “Muslim groups shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ clashed with far-Right rioters.”
In a press conference on Thursday, the content of which was effectively echoed by another on Monday, Starmer said that the “immediate challenge” was “clearly driven by far-right hatred.” Upon leaving the Cobra meeting held prior to Monday’s PR event, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley damaged a journalist’s microphone when questioned about ‘two tier policing’—a much tougher approach to working class protesters than, say, ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers, or, for that matter, Black Lives Matter protests, to which Starmer took a completely different attitude
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage responded that simply blaming the ‘far-right’ ‘doesn’t work”—that “the far-right are a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease that is out there, shared by tens of millions of people.” He added that more attention also needs to be paid to broader “societal decline” and the “breaking down” of law and order.