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It's wild to me that people think this is a new thing for the UK
Maybe it's the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I remember seeing memes about there being CCTV Camera everywhere there going back probably about 20 years
It's not exactly a secret that they don't have the same sort of rights to free speech as the US
A whole house of their parliament is specifically reserved for essentially nepo-babies
Their gun and knife laws are restrictive enough that I'm pretty sure even the most ardent anti-gun nut could probably find something that they think is at least a little excessive if they really looked into it.
Every few years I hear about them trying some new way to restrict who can access what on the Internet.
I haven't heard it much in a while, maybe because of brexit, but for a while it sure as hell seemed to be like a lot of people from the UK were talking about people from countries like Poland in much the same way Americans talk about Mexicans.
It's not exactly an accident that books like 1984 and v for vendetta were written by British authors and set there. Or that punk became so big there.
Look, I'm in the US, I don't have a whole lot of room to be throwing stones here. A lot of my criticism applies to stuff going on here too. But it certainly doesn't surprise me that the UK is skewing pretty fashy these days. That writing has been on the wall for a long time.
There is a very big difference between having restrictive laws which enable society to operate more freely, laws which have significant protections in place to prevent misuse, and laws which impede freedoms.
As well as the implementation of said laws by governments.
It's certainly not a new thing, but the status quo has shifted drastically in the past 5 years especially.
For example, the laws which are being used to quell protest have been around for 20 years and longer, it's just that last year was the first time they have been abused in that way. (As critics of, for example the terror act, suggested it would be)
My point isn't that it's the first time the UK has seen authoritarian skews in government. Churchill set the troops on the miners, Thatcher used secret police against the unions. The point is that the paradigm is shifting back to that, and eroding what has been slowly and painfully won.