Britain’s War Against Photography

London may be overflowing with closed-circuit video cameras, but amateurs taking photos (or “happy snaps,” as one member of Parliament likes to call them) around town are increasingly viewed with suspicion and outright hostility. Sam Delaney surveys the paranoia in a recent piece in The Telegraph that begins wih a tale of his Pentax SLR eliciting “suspicious glances” at the coffee shop before he’s even taken a single photo. Then there are the examples: police prevented one Brit from enjoying and photographing a magical holiday combination of Christmas lights and an EastEnders actress (there to host the festivities). Another was followed into a drugstore for taking photos of “sensitive buildings” while visiting relatives. It’s all in the name of heightened security during times of terrorism, except when it’s about preventing child pornography.

“The growing concern about paedophiles coupled with concerns about terrorism is a heady cocktail that makes police officers edgy,” says Labour MP Austin Mitchell—a keen photographer who was once stopped from taking pictures on a beach on the grounds that there were children present. “I didn’t see any children and none were in my pictures,” he says.

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