It's always interesting how you can tell people's political alignment by which examples they cherry pick to call "authoritarianism", and who they find a sympathetic victim.

The UK does have a really nasty tradition of anti-democratic violence and literal political prisoners, but that's all in Northern Ireland and supposedly in the past. There's also a very long list of police abuses by the Met aimed at the black community as well as violent public order policing in general. And the infiltration of environmentalist groups (the "spycops" scandal).

I don't see too many other HN commentators picking up those examples for some reason.