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- cross-posted to:
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"Protesters who wear masks could face arrest, up to a month in jail and a £1,000 fine under proposed measures that human rights campaigners claim are pandering to “culture war nonsense”.
Police in England and Wales will be given the power to arrest people if they are wearing face coverings at specific demonstrations, the Home Office has said."
Been a bad 18 months or so for privacy in the UK. Online Safety Bill passed, the right to take strike action curtailed, people in receipt of benefits (including disabled people) will soon (as from 2025) have their bank accounts open to the government, the right to protest curtailed and now this.
This is just the first step at making protests illegal.
The first step? They’ve been on this path for years
I think you mean the ninety first step.
Yeah, no, we’re long past that point
https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_information/pcsc-policing-act-protest-rights/
by decades
https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/police-brutality-against-striking-miners-and-cover-ups-laid-bare
and centuries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Good luck enforcing this. I have a right to protest, and I also have an autoimmune disease that means I will wear a mask in public spaces on the advice of my doctor, especially when there’s a new strain of covid.
Look forward to many, many federal cases under the Americans with Disabilities Act, dipshits.
Americans with disabilities act in England? How does that work?
Yeah, I skimmed it, and read UK as US.
Sorry, I have dual citizenship and sometimes conflate the two. Deleted my comment as erroneous.
Antifa ain’t happy about that.
I see no hope for this country. Things are just getting worse and worse every year, how long can this keep going?
It’s pretty bad now, but I seriously worry what things will be like in 20 or so years.
Yall need to grab some pitchforks
World
FTFY
I lived in the UK not that long ago and I lived and live elsewhere in Europe.
It really is a bigger problem in the UK than most of Europe, probably because it apes the US so hard and somehow combines some of its worst shit with their very own local shit (classism, very low social mobility, entrenched ancient elites, post-imperial hangover and other) rather than combining qualities.
It’s mainly Anglon-Saxon countries that are speed running the rise of Fascism, not most of the World.
Never gets old how westerners see themselves as the world.
Right, because the massacre of Ughir in China, genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and attempted genocide of rural Burmese in Myanmar are all such good things. I also remember hearing that North Korea has finally locked down to the point where escape has been deemed impossible, and I don’t know what’s happening in South America or Africa currently, but I’m sure it isn’t all sunshine and roses there too. Oh yeah, isn’t South Korea having major societal issues right now as well? Something to do with women’s rights, if I remember correctly?
The Uyghur narrative is completely made up and has been debunked to death at this point. What Israel is doing in Gaza is directly enabled by the west. Likewise problems in Myanmar are also linked to US operations. Meanwhile, people are literally fleeing South Korea to the north at this point. South Korea is a direct product of western occupation. So yeah, much of the horrors going on in the world today can be traced directly to the western empire.
Climate change only affects westerners? Things are going badly for the world.
Climate change affects everyone, but that doesn’t mean it’s an unsolvable problem. In fact, at least one country is far along the path of mitigating it.
And the other 194 countries?
Some are doing better than others, but emissions aren’t meaningfully improving in most other industrial countries.
Why don’t you move there, tankie?
Oh wait…
Actively working on it dronie. It may surprise you, but learning a new language and uprooting your whole life to move to a different country is a difficult process.
You don’t say? I did that three times. You know what the first time the reason was? The very act that the definition I labelled you of was born out of. You might want to look it up.
As long as world powers are putting profit over everything, we are not going to “solve” climate change.
We know how to fix it. We won’t do it, because there is A LOT of money to be made by doing so.
Sure, capitalism needs to be abolished for humanity to thrive.
Climate change is not something any one country can mitigate. It’s going to take all of us - the world.
Sure, but some countries are leading the change and others are dragging all of us down https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-reserves-crude/index.html
Completely uncalled for, they said nothing to suggest they thought that at all. Great job representing wherever the fuck you’re from by being totally insufferable.
you keep on seething there little buddy, it really suits you
Painful cringe
the only cringe is that you keep commenting here
Tories on a any% speed run to the government from Children of Men, while the left is worried about which way Kier decides to lean that afternoon
People hate on the US all the time, but the first amendment is very unique when you consider how other countries are curtailing people’s right to protest, practice their religion, etc.
Pretty good if actually mattered.
It’s a talking point that’s only upheld on political whim, which defeats the entire purpose of it.
lol you Americans thinking your little piece of paper written centuries ago makes you better than other countries is cute.
Your country is not the beacon of freedom you pretend it is.
At least I’m allowed to defend myself. I was assaulted about two weeks ago and I’m pretty fucking thankful for that “little piece of paper”
So no other country is allowed to defend themselves?
You’ve never left your own country, have you?
Your comment reeks of bad faith argument
You’re avoiding my question.
Why would I engage when I know you’re not actually listening to me?
An argument that might carry weight if you weren’t setting up hotlines for people to snitch on anything or anyone vaguely LGBTQIA+, removing books from libraries, allowing huge orgs to buy political favour, enslaving people in for-profit prison systems etc etc etc.
- Kids shouldn’t be coerced into being gay.
- Yeah lobbying sucks I agree
- If people don’t want to have to work in prison then they shouldn’t commit crimes.
Kids are not coerced in to being gay any more than geese are
Lobbying sucks
We are just ignoring the litany of false accusation and arrests of innocent people forced into modern legal slave labor?
Better hope you never piss off the wrong cop or can afford a good personally retained lawyer if you do
Kids aren’t being “coerced into being gay”. That’s a batshit statement right there.
Also, slavery is always bad. End of story. Putting any leeway in there is disgusting.
You aren’t very smart, are you?
For the crime of homelessness, you are sentenced to a just lifetime of servitude in a for-profit prison. So righteous.
It’s like they think V for Vendetta was a blueprint for how to run a utopia.
Alan Moore was pretty prescient apparently
That’s a good word. I always love learning new words. Thank you!
You’re welcome! I do, too lol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Protesters who wear masks could face arrest, up to a month in jail and a £1,000 fine under proposed measures that human rights campaigners claim are pandering to “culture war nonsense”.
Police in England and Wales will be given the power to arrest people if they are wearing face coverings at specific demonstrations, the Home Office has said.
The move is in direct response to the four protesters being cleared of criminal damage after toppling a statute of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2022 .
Ministers will also make climbing on war memorials a specific public order offence, carrying a three-month sentence and a £1,000 fine.
Shami Chakrabarti, the human rights lawyer and peer, said: “Should rape victims or refugees peacefully protesting really be punished for covering their faces to protect their identities?
The home secretary, James Cleverly, said that recent protests had seen “a small minority dedicated to causing damage and intimidating the law-abiding majority”.
The original article contains 681 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Oi you got a loicence for that mask?
What’s aw 'is, den?
I do but ye cant see mi face on the loicence photo anyways
Hahaha
What if you’re feeling unwell?
JAIL!
Hmm… I may be mistaken but can they not already arrest troublemakers, arsonists, violent/aggressive individuals and other sort of rioters/agitators with preexisting laws/bylaws/regulations ?
On the other hand, I’m trying to see the silver lining here… perhaps this new law will make it difficult for agent provocateur¹ from operating without repercussions and anonymity unless the law specifically has a carve out for them (I wouldn’t be too surprised, but it would be another major blow to the resiliency of democracy in the United Kingdom).
Police discretion will already make an exception for them even it’s not explicitly carved out, there is no silver lining, it’s just more police state shit
Face paint.
You bring up a good point. What qualifies as a mask? Do fake beards and mustaches count? What about religious face coverings? What about people who have prosthetic noses? I have a feeling this is going to be a tricky one for them to enforce in any sort of reasonable way.
A big thing you can hide is the distance between your eyes. Cover one of them with hair or something and any FR tech won’t work as well. You could also have a bunch of infrared led’s on your hat or something then the camera wouldn’t see shit. There’s a video out there that’s an interview with an ex-CIA agent or something that talks about disguises and whatnot.
Doesn’t affect facial recognition tech, which I think is why this passed
There are designs for face paint specifically to defeat facial recognition.
Face paint it is.
Don’t forget to import you some Faygo.
As someone who used to run in the juggalo crowd, idk man Faygo is perfect for some bigger scale resistence bullshit haha
large image
I’m sure there’ll be a carve-out to the mask prohibition. I mean, what if there’s protest action a minister/police department dislikes? They need a way for their agents to don confiscated Nazi paraphernalia before joining the event and poisoning it, while remaining unidentifiable as state actors.
They don’t need a carve out for that, police discretion will do
Genocide Island going back to its roots.
that has been forbidden in Germany for years
Because Germany is here to set a good example right?
What did they do during covid ? Arrest both mask wearers and nonmaskers ?
To police, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Of course it is, it’s fucking Germany.
it will be interesting to see if we ever get to a point during the next inevitable global pandemic where masks are compulsory in some places and illegal in others
The last one hasn’t ended yet
They want it to be illegal to both wear and not to wear a mask so that they can selectivity enforce arbitrary laws against whomever they wish.
Like that traffic light on a rural Russian intersection that is always red
or like in America, where if the cops want to kick your door in all they have to do is say they smelled something and then it’s on you to prove they didn’t
I would do it anyway in mass. I want 100 people to show up somewhere with masks.
100,000 people. With 100, they’ll just take as many as they can. With 100k, they just have to let the sea wash over them and hope they aren’t swept out with it.