I think that a lot of British people have a set of beliefs about their country that are mostly inaccurate and increasingly divergent from reality.
One is that other countries look up to Britain and are keen to trade on terms dictated by Britain. Brexit is exposing this delusion.
A second is that Britain has a fearsome military that allows it to project its influence as a global power around the world.
A third is that Britain is the birth place of civil rights, has always fought against totalitarianism and has a legal system that since Magna Carta has always protected the primacy of the individual against the state. It's much easier to ignore the increasing number of CCTV cameras when you can just tell yourself that Britain invented Magna Carta so how could Britain's civil liberties not be the envy of the world.
With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the government. RIPA and CCTV aren't so much of a concern because they don't impose a physical obligation and so are only going to be bothersome to suspect people anyway.
I sometimes think that if/when Britain becomes a dictatorship it'll be a brutally-enforced version of Middle England, with death sentences for people who don't put their bins out properly and so on.