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Comment by widdershins | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>>And it's also useful for keeping tabs on protesters and strikers, who try to draw attention to their tactics and goals.

It's also worth reminding people that UK government has almost outlawed protesting in this country, by making it illegal for any protest to "cause a disruption", which of course any protest does and police are free to interpret this as they want to.

In this context it makes sense, but the context is false. Ever-deferring problems to class warfare just demotes this actual thing into a conspiracy theory.

E.g. British security services unlawfully collected citizen data for 17 years[0]. They started doing so 4 years into Labour's reign, and it eventually got stopped under the Conservatives.

The "nerd harder" decryption stuff comes up across the aisle, because both sides of the aisle are populated by non-technical people keen to avoid looking as though they're soft on child pornography.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161018003035/https://www.thegu...

No, it should have to do with the British Culture, the lack of anti-authoritarian implants in it, or something like that. The fact that there is no broad political opposition to the laws like this one (There are many others enacted in the last 30 years) is just a symptom.

Labour also supports this.

Labour are Tory-lite. They are unable to win an election otherwise (or so they believe).

As a Brit I concur 100% with this. Eloquently explained

...and shame! for the opposition[s] parties and voters who have allowed it all, and for so long.

the opposition is criticising the government for watering down the law. they wanted it to go a lot further (for example making VPNs illegal).

there is widespread support for rules against the internet.

This is the problem, why turn up and vote Labour if they aren't that much better? Why waste an hour of your day that makes no practical difference to the sorry direction of our country? I despair of all politics.

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