London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time

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!

well, I guess you can always try moving there. It's my suspicion that more people move from China to the UK than the other way around. Why is that? Maybe they haven't heard the news about it being a terrible place.

I get it though. As other posters have said, various British police forces seem to get ahead of themselves and then have to climb back off their hill when confronted with skeptical press [remind me, do you get much skeptical press in China?] and although I do not greatly care for the marchers who carry pictures of ultralights (because yeah! Kill civilians!!) I don't think the people who are nearby and telling us that bombing civilians is wrong (hint: bombing civilians is wrong) should be penalized for doing so. The courts and the electorate will have their say, and (slowly) grind any disagreeing gov't into a policy change. As it should be.

That said, while I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement, I can't because, well, because it's stupid. It's a stupid thing to say. You should reflect more before you type.

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.

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.