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361 points gloxkiqcza | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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torginus ◴[] No.45011561[source]
I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.

Also:

Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).

Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.

Step 3: They get elected.

Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.

Sounds brilliant, lets do this.

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luke727 ◴[] No.45011932[source]
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
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sailorganymede ◴[] No.45012013[source]
Average Brit here - we do not like this and the way politics here has been so tumultuous has shown the general public are sick of this behaviour too.
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1. ghufran_syed ◴[] No.45012076[source]
and yet they keep voting for blue labour or red labour…
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2. inglor_cz ◴[] No.45012271[source]
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
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3. bigfudge ◴[] No.45012421[source]
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.

Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.

4. pydry ◴[] No.45012465[source]
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.

Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.

5. tomatocracy ◴[] No.45012586[source]
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.