UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
The law allows for that, however the implication of the literature released by the Home Office implies otherwise. They literally said "you can't photograph others without permission".
The main issue is that this is an official government publication, and as such people will regard it as factual. It's less that the law could come down on someone taking photos in public, but more that some self-righteous asshole might start a fight with someone taking photos, thinking the more strict version of the law the Home Office implied is accurate.
And there's also the slippery slope aspect of this being a potential first step to removing the right to photograph others without permission altogether.
The literature in the article says "should not", which is advisory and legally different to "can not", as you say.
Ok so the upshot is that asylum seekers don't take photos of people in public because they mistakenly think it's illegal. Doesn't seem like the worst outcome.
The worst outcome is someone reading it (not necessarily an asylum seeker), thinks it's accurate because it's from the government, then uses that to justify harassing people with cameras. People legally going about their day, taking photos in public legally, but contradicting the advice in this leaflet, being harassed due to this leaflet.
The long term worst outcome is that this sentiment spreads until a new law is introduced that actually does prohibit taking photos without permission.