The New Dark Age

On 1 August, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the creation of a new ‘National Violent Disorder Programme’, which he said would “bring together the best policing capabilities from across the country to share intelligence on the activity of violent groups so the authorities can swiftly intervene to arrest them.”

His promise to “deploy facial recognition technology… more widely across the country” has quite rightly attracted alarm, but what did Starmer mean when he pledged “swift deployment of surge teams to forces who need them”?

Britain already has existing specialist public order officers, working within ‘Police Support Units’ (PSUs). PSUs have a variety of different names, from the ‘Territorial Support Group’ in London to the ‘Tactical Aid Unit’ in Manchester. These officers are usually deployed on regular policing duties but have received specialist riot training.

An important part of their mobilisation for major public order situations – like the far-right violence in August 2024 – is through ‘mutual aid’, where forces in England and Wales have powers under the Police Act 1996 to provide aid to each other by sharing specialist officers. This is coordinated by the National Police Coordination Centre (NpoCC), which is based within the Metropolitan Police and was set up in 2013 in the wake of the 2011 riots in England.

As well as an Operations team that coordinates the mobilisation of mutual aid across forces, NpoCC also hosts the Strategic Intelligence and Briefing (SIB) team, which is responsible for analysing and disseminating public order intelligence. In “Lost in the Matrix – how police surveillance is mapping protest movements”, Netpol looked at the role the SIB plays in categorising campaigners into either “lawful activism”, “low-level aggravated activism” or “high-level aggravated activism”.

A job advert for an SIB position in 2023 said this involves research on protest groups and individuals “to develop and maintain intelligence profiles” that include “as much information about the topic… including what protests groups aims and drivers are, what tactics they use, what’s the cause etc”.

Far from something brand new, the ‘National Violent Disorder Programme’ therefore seems like it is mainly a boost for the existing National Police Coordination Centre and its teams, coupled with putting an extra 2200 officers through public order training. After the riots in 2011, police chefs had also focused on the perceived failures of mutual aid so it is not a surprise that expanding and resourcing it is what police chiefs have again lobbied an inexperienced new government for.

This does, however, now make the head of the NpoCC, Chief Superintendent Mark Lawler, effectively in charge of Britain’s first national public order force, with what government ministers have been keen to portray as a ‘standing army’ at his disposal and on standby for the ‘foreseeable future’.

Keir Starmer’s response to recent far-right violence, as journalist Daniel Trilling pointed out last week, “has pursued a strictly law-and-order approach, sounding more like a director of public prosecutions – his old job – than a prime minister”. Even though the recent public disorder is better described as race-rioting than protest, this first test of his leadership almost certainly means that any prospect of Starmer’s new government rethinking the expansion of anti-protest police powers created by the Public Order Act 2023 is now over.

What we can expect instead is more funding for, and more central coordination of protest intelligence gathering, including live facial recognition. The Prime Minister actively supports the police’s dismissal of objections to the intrusion, unreliability and discriminatory nature of facial recognition, and the infringement on civil liberties that the extensive filming of demonstrations entails. We may also see more public order legislation and a greater willingness to quickly deploy riot units onto the streets.

After the immediate crisis recedes, expanded police surveillance is just as likely to focus on movements for social, racial and climate justice as it does on the far-right.

It is important to remember too that by far the biggest legacy of riots in 2011 has been an increasingly authoritarian approach to protest policing, culminating in the swathe of new legislation and new police powers in 2022 and 2023.

This is why we have been urging everyone to take steps to minimise the threat of police surveillance by educating our movements on how we keep each other safe.

You can find helpful resources – including key advice on staying safer during anti-fascist organising – at our Netpol Solidarity website.