How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite

How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things. Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.