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.

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.

well they accepted these people into their country in the first place

Most of the ethno-nationalists are born here.

they are clearly referring to the immigrants the ethno nationalists are againt

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.

250,000 gang rapes are another reason for hostility towards immigrants. As well as the cost.

the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more.

bexit came before the trump election

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)?

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.

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.

Yeah, you see, differently from nationstates, Amazon never built concentration camps, nor does it benefit their business model.

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.

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.