When the UK does things which remind of you that, it isn't a coincidence. To be clear I'm not saying "this is literally 1984" or anything like that, I'm just trying to explain how "surveillance state" and "UK" have a LOT of known history.
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).
British investigative journalist Joe Bloggs wants to research a country's human rights abuses. Joe visits said country with a strong alibi, and covertly discovers the truth. He returns to Britain, publishing under a pseudonym a critical newspaper report exposing the matter. The British intelligence services note that he did so, not because he's under suspicion for anything but simply because they can. The country that he was researching intercepts that intelligence, learning of the journalist's pseudonym.
What do you think is going to happen to poor Joe when he revisits the country to do some more investigation?
> The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country.
https://aithority.com/news/top-10-countries-and-cities-by-nu...
China has 200 million CCTV cameras
US has 50 million
Germany 5.2 million
UK has 5 million
> The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You'll need to provide better citations than just saying that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anyone else, when we have less than the US or Germany, and less per capita too.
A few years ago, it was an arrest every 2 hours over mild internet comments, or 3300 a year. The number is much higher now, but I don't know what it is, specifically. One of the worst parts I can think of is criminally charging teenagers with hate speech for posting rap lyrics.