This only reinforces my image of the UK as a long since resigned totalitarian police state — that, along with the huge 1984-esque CCTV posters with giant eyes hanging watchfully over a dreary autumn midday in London.

It's hilarious. If this technology existed 50 years ago you can be sure they'd be filtering out any homosexual content. "We must protect the children from filth" after all. Good old nanny state.

The posters I referenced were from 2002 [0]... I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten since then.

> Attention Londoners: Big Bobby is watching. That's the message of posters plastered along London's bus routes earlier this week to assuage riders' crime fears.

> But the posters are having the opposite effect on privacy advocates, who say the artwork is creepily reminiscent of the all-seeing authority described in George Orwell's 1984.

> The posters show a red double-decker bus crossing a bridge as four floating eyes stare down from the sky. The eyes' pupils are the symbol of Transport For London, the city's mass-transit provider.

> "Secure beneath the watchful eyes," the poster says. "CCTV and Metropolitan Police on buses are just two ways we're making your journey more secure."

[0]: https://www.wired.com/2002/11/londons-privacy-falling-down/

YouTube does just this[1][2].

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...

The whole "asbo" thing that they had for a long time was also in a similar vein. And the ability of even fairly low ranking police commissioners to declare some area as having "high chance of violence" temporarily, which allows them to stop and search people without warrants or anything like that - basically like stop & frisk in NYC, but without the pushback.

On the upside, following UK police twitter accounts can be sorta hilarious in a sad way, because they regularly post stuff like this: https://twitter.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096...

All that said, it's not really totalitarian. A police state for sure, and an authoritarian uber nanny state, but totalitarianism is a whole different ballgame.

I see much of the hardline Islamic substrate in the UK as deeply totalitarian. See this BBC Panorama documentary on Sharia courts functioning as a separate legal system for an example of what I’m talking about: https://youtu.be/4gZCFdHkd4A.

If the all-powerful, authoritarian UK police and the (currently underground) Sharia courts ever collide or end up working together, that’s going to be one hell of a totalitarian trip. Not good at all.

Though France has similar religious demographics, I think France might at least stand a better chance of holding back the influence of Islam, given the country’s strong and storied secular tradition.

In all Western countries that I know of - including UK - those courts are effectively arbitration courts, so they're very limited wrt the kinds of rulings they can make, and even then both parties have to agree to abide. So they're not really a separate legal system.

Unfortunately, many of them hand down rulings which conflict with UK and other local laws. At the very least they are conflicting systems — to what degree is a point of contention among legal scholars in the UK, as outlined in the linked BBC documentary.

There's no real conflict there, because the proper courts always have priority, same as in any other arbitration arrangement when the parties don't agree to participate.