Live facial recognition cameras were deployed once again outside Finsbury Park station last Thursday

SHAUN Thompson was coming out of London Bridge station when he was stopped by the London Metropolitan police. In February 2024, he was returning home from a shift in Croydon, where he worked with Street Fathers, a community group that protects young people from knife crime.

As he passed a white van, Shaun was approached by a group of seven police officers, who repeatedly demanded fingerprints and threatened him with arrest. Shaun was told that he had been identified as a suspect by facial recognition software. Shaun tried to tell them he wasn’t the person they were looking for. It took 30 minutes for the police to acknowledge they had identified the wrong person.

“It’s stop and search on steroids,” Shaun said. Shaun is now taking the Metropolitan Police to court. In a landmark legal challenge, lawyers will argue that the Met’s use of facial recognition software breaches the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.

Last month, Shabana Mahmood announced the mass roll-out of facial recognition across England and Wales. Live facial recognition cameras were deployed once again outside Finsbury Park station last Thursday, the second time the Met police have gone against a council motion declaring they shouldn’t be used in the borough.

Treating everybody as a potential suspect, facial recognition software turns the presumption of innocence on its head.

“The technology does present a really big opportunity for us,” the home secretary said. An opportunity to do what? Invade the privacy of millions of people? Bars, supermarkets, nightclub entrances. Name the place: the police might be watching.

For those who say, ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide”, tell that to people like Shaun Thompson. In 2017, the Met used facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival. The system identified the wrong person 98 per cent of the time. Two years later, an independent report found that 81 per cent of “suspects” flagged by the software are innocent.

Where there is misidentification, there is discrimination. Eighty per cent of people misidentified by facial recognition in London in 2025 were black. Black women are almost 100 times more likely to be wrongly identified than white women.

I can’t be the only person who finds it distressing to see a whole posse of police officers, ticket inspectors and Home Office officials frequently standing outside tube stations, identifying certain passengers (almost always minority ethnic people) to check on their residence and their right to be in the United Kingdom. You do not build a safer, freer society by assuming everyone is a potential criminal.

The roll-out of facial recognition software is part of a much wider package, which Shabana Mahmood has described as “the biggest reform to policing in two centuries”. This includes the development of new AI tools for police officers, as well as the introduction of a National Police Service (NPS), dubbed the “British FBI”. There is a reason why Britain has never had an official NPS. All governments – Liberal, Labour or Conservative – have been able to see the danger of giving the head of an NPS inordinate control over a civilian population. It’s now a human rights lawyer-led Labour government that is now turning it on its head, placing unprecedented power in the hands of just two people: the commis­sioner of the new NPS and the home secretary.

This is the same home secretary who has overseen the arrest of more than 2,000 people for holding placards in support of Palestine Action – a group that opposes British complicity in genocide. Among those who have been arrested for terrorist offences are teachers, vicars, doctors and pensioners. Are these the kind of people the new NPS, in charge of counter-terrorism investigations, has been given resources to track down? Or will they be left to the Met police, set to be given new powers to shut down protests that have a “cumulative impact”. There is a certain, tragic irony in the fact that the govern­ment may rely on the same facial recog­nition software that has been deployed by Israel to track, bomb and abduct Palestinians in Gaza.

Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn

The government’s latest reforms are part of a much larger programme, designed to decimate the civil liberties we all hold dear. Just this week six Palestine activists were acquitted by a jury trial. This isn’t an anomaly; in 2002, for example, a jury acquitted four individuals charged with criminal damage for toppling a statue of slave trader Edward Colston. Is it any coincidence the govern­ment also wants to remove this fundamental right as well?

Jury trials are the cornerstone of our justice system. It is an absolute disgrace that this government would even consider taking it away. Not least because jury trials are less likely to be racially biased, and more likely to produce a fairer outcome. I don’t need to tell that to the justice secretary. After all, as the author of the Lammy Report in 2017, he’s the one who said it.

All hope is not lost, however. We have proven that collective outrage works. Following a cross-party campaign, the government reversed its plans to introduce mandatory digital ID.

As I said at the time, this was yet another example of excessive state inter­ference that would make the lives of minorities even more difficult. We must now show the same determination to defend the rest of our civil liberties that are under attack.

When waging these campaigns in defence of our human rights, our immediate focus is on the Labour government that is coming after them. But we also have one eye on those that may follow in their footsteps. Ask yourself what it could be like to live in a country where Nigel Farage oversees a system of mass surveillance and jury-less trials. If Reform win the next election, they will warm their hands on the bonfire of our civil liberties – a bonfire that was ignited by this Labour government.

If the government really cared about public safety, it would tackle the underlying causes of crime, and repair the social fabric of our society that has been decimated by years of austerity and privatisation. It would invest in youth centres combating alienation. It would prioritise rehabilitation to help end cycles of substance abuse. It would offer young people opportunities and economic security. And it would invest in our communities to create a fairer, safer society for all.

From mass surveillance to the crackdown on protest, this government is cementing its legacy as a bulldozer of our human rights. Let’s unite our communities against this attack, and fight back: together.