Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
bexit came before the trump election
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Nobody - even the Polish - can quantify the value of the each part of the process, but your rendering of what happened is clearly inaccurate by any and all reasonable measures.
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.