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What is up with the UK? I have always loved my British friends and appreciated England’s history (setting aside their brutality during the British Empire). I ju

• kridsdale1 2y ago
  > I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc. Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
  • trompetenaccoun 2y ago
    Yes but no, post WW2 the UK was one of the most liberal places in the world. Somehow things took a turn in the past two decades or so. And then around the 2020s the decline started to rapidly accelerate. The stories that have come out lately are really insane.
    • 8note 2y ago
      the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more. bexit came before the trump election
      • anonym29 2y ago
        do you have other examples? I have a limited perspective as an American, but I understand Brexit to have been more or less an exception to the way the political winds have generally been blowing in the UK in the last 15 years? Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
        • DocTomoe 2y ago
          Well, ever since the early 1990s the UK have been CCTV capital of the world, where you could not go to a neighborhood shop without being watched by the government in medium-to-large cities. We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
          • chgs 2y ago
            Yet it’s a private American company that has the most cameras everywhere, with no control over them. I’m far more concerned about my neighbours ring camera than I am about a regulated public cctv system.
            • DocTomoe 2y ago
              Yeah, you see, differently from nationstates, Amazon never built concentration camps, nor does it benefit their business model.
        • chgs 2y ago
          Brexit was the tipping point. The “right wing” Tory party in power was progressive - gay marriage for example. This fell apart when the U.K. said it wanted more right wing and kicked out the Liberal Democrat’s. The leader of the Tories - Cameron - had to then rely on the right wing minority of his party and compromised with a referendum. This was lost by 4 percent and that was everything needed for 5 years of chaos, which then doubled down with the most statist intervention in centuries with covid. Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people. Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
    • FreeTrade 2y ago
      Economic decline fuels resentment towards immigrants and minority communities. Government becomes increasingly repressive to keep tensions from boiling over into riots and perhaps worse. This is why countries are obsessed with growth - many things can be papered over with sufficient growth.
      • anonym29 2y ago
        Call me crazy, but it seems probably unwise for any nation to be perpetually operating under "we're a bad recession away from ethno-nationalists starting a race war" as a default state of affairs.
        • tonyhart7 2y ago
          well they accepted these people into their country in the first place
          • vidarh 2y ago
            Most of the ethno-nationalists are born here.
            • cylemons 2y ago
              they are clearly referring to the immigrants the ethno nationalists are againt
              • vidarh 2y ago
                Yes, but my point is that the people that pose the greatest threat to stability are the ethno nationalists. The UK has them violently rioting just last year.
      • collyw 2y ago
        250,000 gang rapes are another reason for hostility towards immigrants. As well as the cost.
    • porknubbins 2y ago
      You can’t really put the UK surveillance state on a political left right axis though. Its an orthagonal trend where various Britains have always been trying to monitor each other for various purposes and that’s why it grows and grows. At least that’s how it looks to me as an outsider.
• switch007 2y ago
  The USA strongarming us after 9/11 didn't help. You don't have to look beyond the borders of the US to answer "what's up with the UK" when it comes to eg terrorism legislation But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  They broke Enigma code, and since then their spy agencies have overweight influence?
  • defrost 2y ago
    Poland broke the Enigma code .. and built the first Bombes. Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
    • PaulRobinson 2y ago
      Not quite right. The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-) In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded. Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years. The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished. There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time. That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
      • Detrytus 2y ago
        So in short: Poles did all the important parts, like actually breaking the code, Brits just throwed some money at the problem, helping to scale the Bombs.
        • shsbdncudx 2y ago
          That’s wildly inaccurate to the point of trolling so I’ll leave it there
• throwaway48476 2y ago
  They wanted to execute Thomas Paine so I'd say about then
• michaelg7x 2y ago
  > I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc. Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
  • leoc 2y ago
    The war on terror was a big thing in the UK long before 2001—largely because there was in fact quite a lot of terrorism going on there, to be clear.
    • chgs 2y ago
      30 years of US funded bombings across the U.K. stopped in 2001 so there’s that.
• Aetheridon 2y ago
  all started after our guns were taken
  • sethd 2y ago
    Perhaps. Another possibility is that the same societal shift that drove the UK to give up the right to be armed also pushed them in the direction of giving up other rights.
• dead_gunslinger 2y ago
  [dead]
• zelphirkalt 2y ago
  UK probably went wrong when they left the EU, which since then has done some work on data protection laws. Leaving the EU will probably turn out a mistake, but they could have, in some areas made it a positive thing. They could have made even stronger data protection and privacy laws for their citizen. They could have enforced them more than the EU enforces GDPR. These things do not happen because of uninformed and corrupt politicians. Trade is of course another area, where they could have tried to ensure, that they stick to EU quality and safety controls, to avoid lots of drama and headache. But it was difficult anyway, because if you stick to all things EU, then why leave in the first place? They would have to uphold standards and improve upon them, while being in a weaker position to negotiate with outside of EU partners.
• DrBazza 2y ago
  We're governed by the most technically inept people possible. The Peter Principle writ large. I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job. Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check. Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check. Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check. That's where the UK is.
  • pfoof 2y ago
    So at least we don't have to worry about anything. Apple can give them access to LLM generated SQLite rows and call it a day. Nobody would notice.