A proposed ban on wearing a face covering at a protest is an enormous challenge to protest organisers and human rights groups
~ Kevin Blowe ~
Labour’s new Policing and Crime Bill, currently under consideration in the House of Commons, has proposed the creation of a new offence of “concealing identity at protests”. This will allow a senior police officer to designate an area where a protest is taking place as a ‘no mask’ zone for up to 24 hours.
There are health and religious defences—but these apply only after arrest, in order to avoid or defend against a subsequent prosecution. Frontline public order officers will have the power to arrest anyone wearing a face covering in a designated area, regardless of what explanation or reasons they give.
The Labour government has a huge majority and it is expected this mask ban will eventually become law later this year.
The impact, when it does, is obvious. We know that police use of facial recognition technology is expanding. There is also more live-streaming, more doxxing by political opponents, and more surveillance on protesters by hostile foreign states. Together, this means it will become even more risky for anyone to exercise their rights whilst maintaining their privacy. Then there are more health problems like long Covid. A face mask ban is also likely to discourage the willingness of many from vulnerable communities to participate in protests at all.
Like other anti-protest laws, creating fear to prop up injustice is the whole point of legislating.
Labour’s decision to try and ban face coverings—a proposal first raised by the Conservatives in 2024—is based on an increasingly authoritarian state‘s understanding that masks represent one of the few remaining, readily available, and effective protections against the crackdown on protest rights.
When the choice to wear a mask is effectively outlawed, the police will unquestionably use their new powers to arrest more protesters. People we know personally, those we say we are allies to, will decide to stay away from demonstrations.
One option for protest organisers and movements is to respond by collectively supporting a campaign of mass non-compliance—an effort to make the arbitrary use of new police powers unenforceable on the streets because everyone is wearing a mask. This would naturally require considerable work on consensus-building and the endorsement of a wide range groups, many of whom who have previously accepted the perception of a mask as a stereotypical symbol of a “violent” (and thus invariably delegitimised) minority.
If coordinated non-compliance is not possible, then campaigners and human rights groups are still faced with the challenge of remaining allies and showing solidarity to people at greater risk of arrest for wearing a face covering.
What will protest groups and movements propose instead—as meaningful solidarity, not empty gestures—if not to continue wearing a mask too?
The right to anonymity
Ten years ago, in 2015, Netpol organised a campaign in defence of the right to wear a face covering at a demonstration, which argued that the ‘right to anonymity’ was an essential protection against growing and unaccountable surveillance. We pointed to examples such as international students worried about the impact on their studies, education and youth workers warned against attending anti-fascist demonstrations, young Muslims targeted by Prevent, and migrants fearful about negative consequences for relatives in their country of origin.
The case against face masks fell then into two camps: either that anonymity removes personal accountability for protesters’ actions, or on the other hand, that large numbers of people had proven serially unwilling to actively frustrate oppressive policing and were unlikely to suddenly embrace mass mask-wearing.
In June 2015, Netpol produced and gave away 2,000 face coverings for free at a People’s Assembly Anti-Austerity demonstration in London. However, in 2017, we admitted we had failed to significantly change attitudes towards face masks as a defence against surveillance. In an article for Freedom, we said: “Rightly or wrongly, masks are seen as emblematic of the use of violence by protesters. They do alienate wearers from allies who reject an association with violence or are simply fearful of a violent reaction from the police if they associate with people wearing masks. Wearing a mask does attract immediate attention from the police and is more likely to lead to protesters facing arrest or a stop-and-search. None of this is going to change until we take the idea of mass protest anonymity seriously”.
It took the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 to make mask-wearing ubiquitous, although collectively we are already forgetting the main reason for wearing one—to protect others, especially people who continue to suffer from health vulnerabilities. The other enormous change over the last decade has been successive governments relentlessly attacking and criminalising protesters with repressive new laws and expanding surveillance technology, especially the now-routine use of facial recognition. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said five years ago: “The rise of facial recognition technology has led to a paradigm shift in comparison with practices of audio-visual recordings, as it dramatically increases the capacity to identify all or many participants in an assembly in an automated fashion… many people feel discouraged from demonstrating in public places and freely expressing their views when they fear that they could be identified and suffer negative consequences”.
Since 2020, this capacity for surveillance has only grown worse.
A decade on from Netpol’s campaign, some groups still argue face coverings are against their belief in accepting the legal consequences of civil disobedience. Others continue to doubt political movements in Britain will ever understand that face masks are, as much as anything else, an act of solidarity.
Soon, however, this will no longer remain a matter of choice or a question of strategy. This is why Netpol is raising the question of how to respond at an early stage in the passage of new anti-protest legislation.
Should protesters accept arrests, repression and the exclusion of allies as inevitable, or prepare to resist new police powers by putting time and energy into a campaign of mass non-compliance? And if neither of these options seem palatable to you, what else is there?
The author is campaigns coordinator at Netpol.
