In particular, surveillance is extremely popular with both of the big UK parties. Well, I say "big", we'll see if the Tories even manage to win a single seat at the next election — I think they're currently expected to get just under 100 seats, but they're so dysfunctional that total disintegration is absolutely possible between now and then.

I don't believe that's true. Our younger generations are way more savvy about those things than our older ones.

What I do see is a sense of hopeless inevitability. People don't feel they can escape the surveillance and other technological dangers because everyone is at it. Both of our major political parties are generally supportive of the police and surveillance state and no-one else has any realistic prospect of forming a government at national level. Unless you give up a large part of modern life and decide not to participate in large parts of our society you have little real choice but to pick your poison from the big tech firms as well.

So people resist in less obvious ways like moving between services and creating new accounts frequently with false details. People from younger generations hardly ever commit to any single account on any service the way their parents or grandparents did. They have no time for terms and conditions that require real identities. (Or the service will do what exactly? Terminate the account they didn't really care about or expect to use for long anyway?) I imagine a lot of young people already know how to use a VPN and probably more will start doing so over time. I wonder how many phones the average teenager really has today.

Of course this attitude creates other problems of its own. With modern tech but little personal accountability we see issues like cyberbullying becoming real problems for our schoolkids for example. Unfortunately the only answer the politicians can seem to think of to deal with a problem like that is trying to be even more authoritarian. We need to do better than that.

Did she die in vain?

> the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe)

Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?

I think Habeas Corpus is one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that still has legal effect (the former is part of the latter).

And remember that Magna Carta was a deal between the "barons" and King John; the rights that Magna Carta purported to confer, only applied to barons (landowners, basically). In the time of King John, the law as most ordinary people encountered it was simply the local baron.

I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.