The Conservative party are in government. Their programme is designed to extract wealth and political agency from the general populace, and suck it up into the control of their own class of people (a mixture of landed gentry, financiers etc).

Their vehicles for doing this are fear and distraction, propagated by the media outlets they and their friends own.

In this context, zeal for surveillance makes perfect sense. It plays well with people convinced by the Daily Mail that some boogyman (immigrants, paedophiles, whatever) is coming to get them and their children. And it's also useful for keeping tabs on protesters and strikers, who try to draw attention to their tactics and goals.

the change was demanded a long time ago by civil society organisations.

the opposition is criticising the government for watering it down (for example: the opposition wanted VPNs to be made illegal).

there is widespread approval of anything that curbs the power of internet companies.

It's not that bad. We don't have ID cards unlike places like Germany or Spain and don't have an equivalent of a US social security number. I've never felt particularly surveilled here.

It seems the government wants to move forward till the country actually looks like it does in “V for Vendetta”

I guess one could also argue the other way around: that Orwell knew his compatriots all too well to come up with the particular fears expressed in 1984 and Animal Farm (both set in perverted late stage socialistic rather than capitalistic/neolib societies btw).

Following this line of thought, not only did Orwell describe surveillance, but also mass manipulation, so perhaps in UK more than elsewhere there's a tangible fear of mobilizing and polarizing the masses through media, fuelled by liberal press laws, class awareness, and traumatic experience in eg Brexit campaigns, possibly at least partly financed by a foreign adversary.

UK still has the attitude that social classes are a legitimate and real thing. That there exist people to rule or be ruled. Similar attitudes manifest in other western nations but none so normalized that huge sums of taxpayer money funds the lavish lifestyle of a specific family's bloodline, so explicit that living rulers (not leaders, self identified rulers) are placed on every instrument of currency. Their de jure power may be ceremonial but the cultural effect is very real, even if subconscious.

Such an attitude enables practices that better attitudes would see as abhorrent.

It’s the tories/conservatives. They love this sort of total authority stuff. They’re also keen to bail on intl human rights orgs because it limits what they can do to migrants.