Once you have censorship facility in place, the area of its application will only grow. The term "illegal information" is also widely used in Russia for the same purpose.
Authoritarianism is a sliding scale. From what I can gather, lots of humans that have any political pull at all tend to be authoritarian (against the kinds of people they don't like, of course).
Not sure why you think the UK is an authoritarian regime. Check any ranking and it is one of the freest countries out there (Heritage Ranking, for example: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking)
It's a fairly small network for an authoritarian government.
[0]https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo....
In fact, given how small London is that's a huge network.
London's population: 8.982 million
Area: 8,382 km2.
How is that small?
I see you're referring to the "Metro area of London". when referring to that size. The size of London proper is 1,572 km2 (Wikipedia, as well)
So now, the fun question is "what area is the camera count referring to?"
Further, the quantity of cameras matters less than the areas the cameras can see that is covered.
Even further-further is how easy it is for the government to acquire the footage off those cameras.
The word authoritarianism appears to have lost all meaning in internet circles. What authoritarianism actually is, is a people being governed without their consent by a government they did not elect. If British citizens, or their representatives decide they put significant value on public safety rather than privacy that's a choice.
I think it's probably more like a survivorship bias than an innate quality. The only people who are capable of surviving in politics long enough to the point where they have any meaningful influence are the ones who know how to use the systems under their control to protect themselves while tearing down their opponents. Usually this means attempting to consolidate power in themselves, ie. authoritarianism.
edit: or making laws that are more about making it illegal to do something some people find icky or culturally unusual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...
Modern art and music – particularly “evil” jazz – were all banned. Our best writers had to leave the country. The writers that didn’t leave had to apply to the Department of Justice for permission to possess a copy of their own book. The video nasties of the eighties didn’t even have a chance to become a problem in Ireland.
The UK’s censorship of the Irish Republican movement paled in comparison to that of Ireland. Enforcement of Section 31 of the Broadcasting act began in the early seventies and lasted until the mid-nineties. And it was often interpreted to prevent Sinn Féin members from speaking about non-political issues. We didn’t even get to have Stephen Rae’s voice standing in for Gerry Adams.
As a young adult in the mid-nineties, censorship was still an issue: I only ever saw Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” on a very crap video in a student centre. I remember watching Robert Rodriguez’ “From Dusk Till Dawn” in a cinema in the Netherlands knowing that it was banned back at home and around the same time, I remember it being a big deal when the ban was lifted on Playboy magazine.
Until the late nineties, it was illegal to provide any information about abortion services – regardless of circumstances or if the services were in other countries. Newspapers and periodicals from the UK that contained listings or advertisings for abortion services had the relevant pages removed before they could be sold by Irish newsagents. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children successfully won cases against family planning agencies (that went all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights) and the Union of Students of Ireland for providing information about clinics in the UK that provided abortion services.
I'm not sure what mentioning such old events brings to the conversation, any more than a discussion of modern US censorship would benefit from discussing the Satanic Panic under Reagan.
Perhaps you would care to elaborate?
[1] Many quipd that the reason she was cremated was that a burial grave would have needed a ballroom to be built above it.
What does the UK have to do so that people will accept that the UK is lying when it calls itself a free country? Start arresting people for speech? For activism? Kill protesters?
Almost as if, (at this point in time), the benefits of this to the people of the country(not just you) outweigh the negatives...
It's just one of those things a government with a large majority keeps quiet about until it's got plenty of time between elections to bring it up and push it through before the next one.