The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.
I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.
However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.
Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.
https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
And btw, yes it is possible the Met are lying. There have been multiple FOIs in the recent past where police forces have lied about this kind of thing. Aston Villa policing being one of the most obvious examples. It isn't particularly relevant to this case though but, given the massive changes in policing over the last few decades, it is generally wise to be cautious. This is why the IOPC exists and has been so critical of the Met.
His last protest was in september, it was pretty violent. 26 police officers were injured.
Tommy robison has the advantage here in that its not illegal to express public support for him and his march, unlike palestine action where its very much illegal to do so (hence why there are >2000 arrests)
> they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators"
if this is a march for uniting the british realm why would he need foreigners to speak? Last time Musk incited violent overthrow of the UK government. Which is rich coming from a fucking Afrikaner.
> we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
Nice I see what you did there. Everyone immigrant is a terrorist. Look, if people turn up illegally, then its fair to process them fairly and return. There is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is changing the law so its impossible to do that, unless we pay £300k a year to send 4000 people to an african country. yes, just 4k people, not a year, total.
The biggest issue facing the UK is that we have not had a working government since 2007.
We also have foreigners people paying people £300 to fire bomb ambulance stations. Its almost like theres a vested interest in fomenting unrest...
Given the number of people involved, that is a pretty low level of violence.
> unlike palestine action where its very much illegal to do so (hence why there are >2000 arrests)
Specifically the arrests were for supporting a group banned as a terrorist group. I am opposed to that law, but its important to be clear why they were arrested.
> if this is a march for uniting the british realm why would he need foreigners to speak
More fundamentally, visas are issued at the discretion of the government. I can think of people with far better cases for entering the country who have been refused visas - for example, academics attending conferences. I wonder how many of the people protesting about these 11 people getting visas were upset about those?
> unless we pay £300k a year to send 4000 people to an african country. yes, just 4k people, not a year, total.
That is just £75 a year per person. it is a LOT cheaper than keeping them in the UK. I think they get something like £50/week if not in catered accommodation.
> Look, if people turn up illegally, then its fair to process them fairly and return. There is nothing wrong with that
What is wrong with the current process is that it is slow and inefficient. There is also a problem with what to do with those who do not have documents as its hard to return them without evidence of where they should be returned to.
It is also grossly unfair as it actually lets in a lot of people who have no real claim while a lot of people who are genuine refugees cannot get here: look at the ratio of people belonging to religious minorities vs majority from Iraq or Syria. In 2025 there were over 2k asylum claims from Sri Lankans, a safe country (the civil war is long over). There are a lot of other countries I am sceptical about but do not have the same direct knowledge of. Why not send people who are clearly from a safe country back immediately?
> The biggest issue facing the UK is that we have not had a working government since 2007
I think that is optimistic. I would put the date a lot earlier!
I was of that opinion, alas it was not £300k for 4000, it was £300k _per_ person. double checking again to make sure I am not talking bollocks the spread is 100k-450k per person depending on how you calculate (ie total cost or ignoring upper bounds on people being processed)
the NAO says it was expensive: https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/the-costs-of-the-uk-rw... Migrant observatory says more expensive: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries...
Its was an exceedingly badly designed policy, that meant that it was illegal to process any asylum claims outside of sending people to rwanda. So the actual cost is even higher, because we had to find a fuck tonne of temporary accommodation. Even worse was that we were sending people who were granted asylum to rwanda, not people who failed.
It prioritised optics over solving the problem.
hence my anger.
> Why not send people who are clearly from a safe country back immediately?
because it was illegal to process any claims until the Rwanda scheme was up and running. At its height, there could only be 4000 people processed.
My friend, I think we both want the same thing, We want fair and legal processing of migrants. We want to make sure that those in need are offered compassion and care, those that take the piss, sent packing.
An entire class of commentator and politician decided that performance was more important than delivery, and we end up where we are. The _most_ annoying thing is that it drives a wedge between people who would otherwise normally agree.
With regard to sending people back to safe countries immediately, I do not mean as part of the Rwanda scheme, but in general. i.e. if someone from a country that is known to be safe claims asylum why not just immediately refuse them?
I agree what the vast majority of people want is a fair and efficient system. I think there are two things going on as well as the focus on optics rather than reality. One is that politicians contempt for the hoi polloi is such that they interpret any opposition to immigration as racist. The reality is that it is a lot more nuanced and most people are opposed to some immigration, not all immigration (e.g. skilled vs unskilled, legal vs illegal, etc.). The current government is very proud of having reduced immigration by reducing the number of skilled workers and students entering the country! The other thing is that it is a useful distraction from other issues and a scapegoat.
The reason it "cost" so much is because it was never used. You have confused stack with a flow. Basic error. In addition, the expectation was that it would be a deterrent because people are coming here primarily for economic reasons. The reason the government believed this to be the case is because the same thing has been tried in other countries and worked, Australia did this and now (in a turn of events that will presumably shock you) people are complaining that the cost of the deterrent is too large...because no-one tries to get there by boat anymore.
We have to find temporary accommodation anyway. Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy, I am not sure how anyone could think otherwise. It is enshrined in our law functionally: if someone comes here illegally, we have to house them in a hotel and then we have to provide them with a council house if their claim is successful.
One of the bills, theoretically, created the legal basis to detain anyone who comes to the UK by irregular means. However, and despite the usual noisy crowd saying it was the end of democracy, there is no functional capacity within the Home Office to effectuate this...quite simply, there is isn't the administrative capacity (or, with Labour, the political will). This power exists and is completely unused. We are also unable to return people which makes indefinite detention of 300-400k people at a minimum challenging.
But this act is used to detain some illegal migrants in prison in some cases. Usually this is terrorism-related but, I believe, this has also been used in the many cases of sexual assault.
It was not illegal to process claims whilst the Rwanda scheme was running. One, it was never started, it was due to start after the last election if the Tories ran. Two, it did not change the status of people arriving, the Tories put substantial resources into the Home Office to reduce the backlog (one of the issues here is productivity because so many claims are accepted and there is a large industry dedicated to helping claimants, average processing time is 14 days...it is very slow).
Labour policy is to create a wedge because, to be frank, reducing immigration is devastating for a party that relies so heavily on voters who feel a kinship with the vast majority of illegal migrants. In some areas, Labour majority is almost all this demographic, and almost all illegal migrants make up this same demographic. We are speeding down the path to balkanization, this happened under the last Labour government and has happened under this one. There is a long historical record here of this happening in other countries that people are determined to ignore. One of the reasons why Labour went for student visas immediately, in addition to the massive level of fraud, is because people from these countries do not vote for Labour in the UK. Leaving Pakistan off the list, when it is a country that also does not accept returns and has huge number of fraudulent student visa was very obvious (and btw, some UK unis no longer accept students from Pakistant because of the fraud...this is exceptional). That is the wedge.
You cannot get asylum on economic grounds.
> Australia did this
And it didn't work. They spent $12 billion(aussie dollars) on ~4000 people. which is a pointless waste of cash, even more so when they had to evacuate those granted asylum back to aus because they were so badly looked after.
> We have to find temporary accommodation anyway. Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy,
Correct, but temporary accommodation is >>£ than normal accommodation. If you can't progress a claim because the destination is blocked, then you need more temporary accommodation. The crucial thing is, when your claim is processing, you can't work, which means we have to pay for everything.
Once the claim is processed and they have asylum, they can work, which means we don't need to pay anywhere near as much to look after them.
> But this act is used to detain some illegal migrants in prison in some cases. Usually this is terrorism-related but, I believe, this has also been used in the many cases of sexual assault.
No this is just the law. anyone who commits those acts are meant to be in jail, because it's illegal. thats how the law works.
> detain anyone who comes to the UK by irregular means.
What the bill actually does is make it almost impossible to claim asylum in a catch 22 style. Basically if you come here any any means, with the intention of claiming asylum, it invalidates any visa you may have. This means your entry in the UK was illegal. So there are no legal routes to claim asylum out side of the two special schemes for ukrainains and Hong Kongers.
the problem is, because they didn't do the ground work that would remove the contradicting laws. Which means its not really possible to defend it in court.
> Rwanda changed absolutely nothing about that policy, I am not sure how anyone could think otherwise
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/illegal-migration-dealing...
Basically because it was illegal to send people to anywhere other than rwanda, and rwanda was ready, and wasn't legal to send anyone to for processing, it meant that no-one could be processed. This was a known and telegraphed problem of the bill. This act: https://www.legal500.com/developments/thought-leadership/ill... made it legal to process claims again.
> the Tories put substantial resources into the Home Office
Yes, and it was spent on accommodation and rwanda.
> We are speeding down the path to balkanization,
No, we really are not. Go to Rotterdam and look at how integration happens there (hint, it fucking doesnt) In Britain we do integration really well. kids of immigrants have excellent outcomes in education and employment. For example out of the last 8 years there has only been 4 months where someone who isnt a child of a migrant held the top spot (6 out of 8)
> Labour went for student visas immediately,
Actually the tories did that first. The best part? now we have to pay more to bail out universities.
> There is a long historical record here of this happening in other countries that people are determined to ignore.
What record is that?
People outside the UK have been banned from attending because they are "agitators". The reason why Palestine Action is illegal is because they organized terrorist attacks, this protest is not illegal and one of the pro-Palestine groups attending is the largest donor to Labour.
Why would foreigners not be allowed to speak? Britain is a diverse melting pot where all peoples can discuss ideas freely. Petty nationalism and xenophobia isn't welcome here.
I didn't mention anything about every immigrant. I am saying that undocumented people have entered the country and carried our terrorist attacks. It isn't impossible to fix this, Labour changed the laws to push people back aggressively in 2004 (iirc, it was before the GE). What has changed is the electoral makeup of the UK, there is a massive constituency for as many illegal immigrants as possible. That is fomenting unrest because it involves massive social and cultural change in order to make up for the fact that Labour's support collapsed amongst their core vote. This isn't a complex or unusual situation: these things are happening because people are heavily incentivised. Changing the law is "wrong"...of course, you wonder why we have't had a working government at the same time? Lol. If any of this stuff was actually fixed, it would be very bad for political parties.
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
At least Farage/Yaxley and their hangers-on are clearly on the make.
Odd way to say you've never been to london.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
The same one that threatening concentration camps in areas that don't vote for them? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c362e9p385yo
Farage is not the most extreme in his party. Sadly.
I would gently point out that if the immigration system worked like it used to, then we wouldn't need large amounts of detention centres. For two years it was illegal to process asylum claims. This meant that the backlog stacked up, costing a fuck tonne of cash.
More egregiously instead of sorting the problem. Various Home secretaries chose politics rather than building systems to track and efficiently process claims.
Detention centres are a massive sign of failure. I don't want them anywhere, I want my money to be spent on sorting the problem not showboating how cruel we are to people we don't like. (Which I would point out is directly against biblical teachings)
Which politicians do you expect to follow Biblical teachings? As far as I can see all of the main are fundamentally opposed to Biblical teachings. Which politician can you imagine giving all they have to the poor, for example :)
> Various Home secretaries chose politics rather than building systems to track and efficiently process claims.
That is true. The system is a complete mess, highly inefficient, and ineffective in accurately assessing claims.
> Can you please explain to me how you managed to divine my preference for immigrants from my post
Maybe not you, but as I said in another comment it has made it awkward for some - the Green party in particular have been made to look hypocritical.
Interesting that your example of the dangerous racist extremist is a brown Muslim.
Also interesting I got downvoted for a true purely factual comment. Says something about the people doing it.
If they turned violent, or deliberately intimidated people, then yes.
Under UK law if they said certain things that are considered hate speech laws, then again yes.
There are also laws around protests (where and when, legal mechanisms of bans, orders banning particular individuals from particular actions) so if anyone breached those, again, yes.
Robinson is gutter racism. Farage is trying to be its respectable face.
I assume the £5m did not come with similar strings attached.
The Green Party is now a lot more racist. Have you not read of the comments coming out of people withing the party, particularly its newly elected local councillors?
IMO Labour are more subtle, but are as racist as Reform. They use race to attack politicians in other parties - they portray non-white Conservatives as race traitors, for example. They have a white saviour outlook, and stereotype and condescend us poor inferior groups: remember the Labour MP who said James Cleverly was not properly black because his family are affluent.
While Reform technically didn't exist at the time Farage had his "Breaking Point" poster and all it echoed from the mid 1900s, Farage was very much responsible for it and he literally owned Reform until very recently.
There are also smaller groups that are worse: Restore and the EDL.
My real problem is with people who equate Reform with racism which is dangerous for two reasons. It gives racists on the "left" a free pass, and it ignores smaller but nasty groups on the "right". My biggest concerns are the Greens (who are likely to win a lot of sears in the next parliament), antisemitic independents, and Restore Britain who won all the seats the stood for (albeit in the same area) in the recent local government elections.
Also an underlying attitude that it is OK to be racist about some particular group, or people in the wrong political parties.