It would not be unreasonable to say that the last Labour government had a chequered history on civil liberties. What started with a Human Rights Act, designed to protect our rights and freedoms, ended with ID cards, the mass rollout of CCTV cameras, the introduction of new and punitive civil orders like ASBOs, attempts to erode trial by jury and the introduction of long periods of detention without trial for terror suspects. The so-called war on terror materially changed British society and made us all less free as a result.
On their first days in government, Keir Starmer’s administration appeared to show a party that had turned a new leaf. Goaded in a Times op-ed by Tony Blair to re-introduce a digital version of his beloved ID cards, ministers insisted this was not a path they wanted to go down. But last night Starmer, a former human rights lawyer no less, revealed his authoritarian streak for the first time with a move that is as reckless as it is knee-jerk.
In a statement on the ugly scenes of public disorder in Southport, the new Prime Minister pledged a ‘wider deployment of facial recognition’ surveillance among a raft of other measures, designed to crack down on far-right agitators in the streets and online. In a moment in which he felt something had to be done, goaded by police chiefs intent on promoting their Chinese-style surveillance tools, Starmer reached blindly into the dark and pulled the first lever he could find. Without consideration for the consequences for our rights, freedoms or society more broadly he touted the rollout of one of the most invasive forms of surveillance technology available today.
In reality, there is little need for analogue identity checks when live facial recognition turns us all into walking ID cards. This form of digital surveillance scans the faces of crowds of people indiscriminately, checking us, identifying us, tracking us and comparing our faces to databases of people of interest. This is the technology of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin, with the former making the concept of privacy a thing of the past in modern day China. Meanwhile in democratic countries around the world, governments are choosing to restrict or even prohibit the use of live facial recognition technology altogether. Ironically, on the day Starmer announced the expansion of this invasive surveillance tech the EU commenced legislation which would ban its use in all but a few select circumstances.
But Britain isn’t Russia or China, many will clamour. Our complacency as a country which has a proud history of preserving our freedoms creates the perfect conditions for their erosion. The trope ‘if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear,’ does little to assuage concerns about the use of live facial recognition. Earlier this year, two innocent members of the public were stopped by both police and private sector versions of these systems. They were accused of being criminals and forced to prove that they were not; a total inversion of the presumption of innocence. Neither had done anything wrong and both were misidentified by live facial recognition surveillance. With 74% of all face ‘matches’ by police facial recognition systems in the UK being incorrect, it is clear that this is not an effective tool in the fight against crime.
Meanwhile, Starmer’s statement and push for more facial recognition surveillance comes in the total absence of any specific legislation which sanctions its use, or formal consultation with Parliament. This is unfathomable given the impact the proliferation of this technology would have on our freedoms and our society more broadly. Last year, 65 MPs and peers called for a stop to live facial recognition in the UK altogether, yet Starmer has not thought to ask the permission of our democratically elected representatives as he opens the gate to more AI-powered surveillance.
Many of those who fear the far right and the ugly scenes we saw in Southport on Tuesday night are worried about the possibility that, in the future, such a movement may grow to such prominence in our society that they are able to take the reins of power and impose an authoritarian or even dictatorial government upon us. These are legitimate fears. However, in the face of a threat by agitators who may endanger our democracy, the answer cannot be to impose solutions which themselves undermine our rights and freedoms. This Government should learn from the needless and often failed battles of the Blair era, and rethink this authoritarian decision.