For a party that insists it is on the side of the people, the current UK Labour government shows an increasingly uncomfortable tendency to treat privacy and personal freedom as optional extras, privileges to be granted when convenient, rather than rights to be protected.
Recent policy moves reveal a temperament that blends centralised control with low tolerance for dissent or deviation. Expanded surveillance powers, from facial recognition deployments to sweeping access to personal data under the banner of safety, are framed as pragmatic governance. Yet the cumulative effect is unmistakable. the individual shrinks while the state grows.
The latest announcement is the increased use of facial recognition powers for the Police. Pitched as a tool to catch criminals and find missing persons sounds reasonable until you look at what is happened elsewhere including in democracies:
- United States – Wrongfully arrested (all Black) after false matches from facial recognition systems.
- France – Used during the COVID to monitor public gatherings, sparking legal challenges.
- Sweden – Police fined for unlawfully using facial recognition to monitor school pupils.
- Italy – Bologna Introduces Social Credit App to Promote ‘Virtuous Behaviour’.
Not to omit the usual cadre of authoritarian candidates:
- China – Targeted Uyghur Muslims for mass detention and their social scoring dystopian surveillance driven citizen control system.
- Russia – Tracked and arrested peaceful protestors within hours.
- India – Identified opposition supporters at political rallies.
The list could go on, so do your own search and sit back in despair. Different countries, different contexts, same pattern. Once deployed, scope expands, oversight slips and misuse follows sometimes by design, sometimes by neglect.
The tech itself is not the problem. The temptation to stretch it beyond its original remit is. An we have politicians in power with a mindset of bottom up ‘control’ and nanny state interference. The most worrying aspect being a self-belief that they know better when the adage of ‘a little knowledge is dangerous’ has never been more applicable. Look at the latest fiasco on the implementation of age verification checks that I wrote about earlier (Age Gate or Farce Gate!).
If the UK gets this wrong, we will not be asking “should we use facial recognition?”, but “how do we take it back?”
Socialist leaning governments often argue that ‘the collective good’ outweighs personal liberty. The problem is that who defines the collective good? In practice, it tends to be ministers, advisers and party machinery, not the public. With the current cohort Ministers are individuals inexperienced in real world commercial reality and negligible competence in the offices of state they now occupy. When those in power have an instinct for control, led my senior office holders driven by an invidious politics of envy and spite, it is no suprise they tend to see privacy not as a safeguard against abuse, but as an inconvenience.
We are told it is all for noble causes protecting citizens, ensuring fairness, tackling crime. History has much to teach us, from the Stasi’s dossiers to modern algorithmic surveillance, shows how such powers, once granted, are rarely rolled back. The line between security and coercion can blur quickly and temporary measures have a habit of becoming permanent fixtures.
The real danger is not the tools themselves, but a governing bodies apparent comfort in wielding them without robust safeguards, independent oversight or deep public debate let alone independent impact assessment transparency. Freedom does not usually vanish overnight, it erodes in increments, each justified as harmless, necessary, or ‘for the greater good’.
If we care about living in a society where privacy and autonomy mean something, we should be paying very close attention to where this government’s temperament is leading us. Because once freedoms are gone, they rarely return intact.
Posted on August 13, 2025
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