Brexit leader Nigel Farage eviscerated the left-wing British government for piling depredations upon depredations on the British people, as they announced yet another postponement of local elections without good reason, on the same day they moved to roll out China-style facial recognition cameras.
Speaking at a Reform Party press conference, Mr Farage said of these “monstrous” changes:
…today’s the day we learn that there will be surveillance cameras not just in our big cities, but literally in every single village. The surveillance state is getting very, very close indeed.
And that, of course, in the same week that we learn the 800-year-right to trial-by-jury is to be abolished in the majority of cases… and of course despite not being in the manifesto, the government want to introduce digital I.D., leaving literally every single one of us in this country open to hackers.
And it is, frankly, a very authoritarian government. It doesn’t really believe in liberty, it doesn’t believe in individual freedom, and we learn it doesn’t really believe in democracy either.
The government already suspended elections across swathes of England last year, leading to accusations of cynical political calculus by the governing Labour Party as the areas impacted were predicted to be dramatic Reform Party gains. Now more elections are to be postponed, with four newly created mayoralities being pushed back two years to 2028.
The public had been told these elections were coming, millions of pounds of public money had been spent preparing to host them, and political parties had started campaigning for them, Mr Farage said. In Reform UK’s case, their candidate for the Mayor Hampshire and Solent — Falklands War veteran Admiral Chris Parry, well known for being the first man anywhere to sink an enemy submarine since the Second World War — was announced just hours before the government cancelled the elections.
Mr Farage said his strong candidates and party’s sky-high polling had influenced the government’s decision to push the votes far into the future. He said: “there is of course one very big reason why [the government thinks] these elections should not go ahead… that Reform would have won all four of these contests and would have won them quite comfortably. The government are basically committing electoral fraud upon the electorate”.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice also slammed the government, stating Labour is “terrified” of a wipeout at Reform’s hands and “that is a deliberate dictatorial cancelling of democracy in the United Kingdom and we shouldn’t tolerate it”.
All major opposition parties have criticised the move, The Guardian noted, and even some Labour figures have spoken against their own government.
Labour’s own Jim McMahon, who was the minister for local government until he was forced out of the government over internal party politics in September, would have been in charge of these decisions had be remained in post. He said Labour needs “to be better than this” and that the government has a “moral and a legal obligation” to not cancel elections.
It is reported he said: “All involved had a reasonable expectation that these elections would go ahead, and the government knows that trust is hard won but is easily squandered.”
Meanwhile, the British government announced it was kick-starting the process to create legislation for the mass roll-out of facial recognition technology nationwide. While only a handful of police forces presently use facial recognition cameras, it tends to be in an ad-hoc fashion and they only check faces against the police database of people who have previously been arrested.
Under the new plan, a China-style comprehensive national network of cameras, covering not just major cities but even regional towns and villages, would be checking against a super-database of criminal records, the passport and drivers licence datasets, and immigration arrivals.
The system would also allow police to feed in evidence gained retrospectively into the A.I.-powered system, including eyewitness phone videos, doorbell cameras, and private security footage.
Policing minister Sarah Jones was cited by The Daily Telegraph as having hailed the rollout of cameras as a major leap-forwards in the ability of the government to find criminals, including sex criminals and illegal migrants. She said facial recognition cameras are “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching”.
Stalwart defender of individual privacy and liberty Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, warned the government was in the process of turning the country into an “open prison” where innocent members of the British public are subjected to the “risk of misidentifications and injustice”.
She said: “Every search through this harvest of our personal photos puts millions of innocent citizens through a police line-up without our knowledge or consent. Sir Keir Starmer’s Government is committing to historic breaches of Britons’ privacy that you might expect to see in China but not in a democracy”.
Breitbart News
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