STARMER’S Labour government’s move to turn Britain into a police state has taken a dramatic step forward this week with its announcement of plans to massively expand the use of facial recognition technology by the police.
Yesterday, it announced a Home Office consultation to establish a legal framework for all police forces to use this facial recognition technology.
At present, facial recognition is used by nine police forces, but under Labour’s proposals this will be extended to every police force in England and Wales. Part of this consultation are plans to give the police access to Britain’s passport database of 45 million Britons.
Previously, police have had very limited access to the passport database but under Labour’s proposals they will enjoy unlimited access with passports becoming ‘mug shots’ for a giant surveillance database, putting the public at risk of misidentification and injustice.
Apart from storing the photos of 45 million people holding UK passports, the police are pushing for permission to roll out ‘live’ facial recognition cameras.
Currently these ‘live’ cameras are used to scan for wanted suspects in ‘crime hotspots’ in England and Wales. Now, the Labour government is proposing to extend this to roll out facial recognition cameras in every city, town and even villages across the country.
This proposed expansion of facial recognition cameras to every street corner in the country was denounced by civil liberties groups, with Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo saying: ‘For our streets to be safer the government need to focus their resources on real criminals rather than spending public money turning the country into an open-air prison with surveillance of the general population.’
She continued: ‘Facial recognition is out of control, with the police’s own records showing over seven million innocent people in England and Wales have been scanned by police facial recognition cameras in the past five years.’
She added: ‘Live facial recognition could be the end of privacy as we know it. With the government now threatening to introduce mandatory ID cards with our facial biometrics on them too, we are hurtling towards an authoritarian surveillance state that would make Orwell roll in his grave.’
Personal photos of the entire population, whether from passports or from cameras situated on every street corner, means millions of innocent people will be put through a police-line up without their knowledge or consent.
Under the new proposed legal framework, Labour is pushing the other public bodies, apart from the police, to be allowed to use facial recognition technology, along with private companies like retailers.
The total surveillance by the capitalist state over the entire population would be handed to the police and private companies by the Starmer government, turning Britain into an ‘open prison’.
Following on from compelling people to carry ID cards, which would contain biometric information used in facial recognition, another proposal by Home Secretary Lammy is to undermine the right to trial by jury, and also use anti-terror laws to ban and jail demonstrators opposing Zionist genocidal in Gaza.
This is the latest attack on basic rights of workers from Starmer’s government as the capitalist state sheds the old façade of being a bourgeois democratic state and moves rapidly towards becoming a police state.
Starmer’s move towards a police state comes at a time when the state is preparing to unleash a class war on the working class to impose brutal austerity cuts to try to rescue bankrupt British capitalism.
The powerful UK working class will not tolerate a police state in the UK but will demand the TUC mobilises the strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a Workers Government and socialism.
The urgent job today is to build up the WRP and Young Socialists to provide the revolutionary leadership required for the working class to take the power and advance by smashing the capitalist state and going forward to a workers state and socialism.
There is not a moment to lose! Forward to the British Socialist Revolution to bury capitalism for all time and to pave the way for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
