Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I've never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair's lies in support of GW Bush's second Gulf War.
Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.
All of a sudden?
This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.
And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they're in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner's retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that's the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else's face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for "quiet, polite fascism," I've lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I've always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don't kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can't be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there's far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
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They over there looking at America being the absolute fuck up it is and are jealous.
To be fair, they were the OGs of a prosperous stable country spontaneously shooting themselves in the head because someone convinced them they could be doing SOOO much better aaaannd it's gone...
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It's always been a bit like this, actually
Yep. Politicians creating tech policy on the fly without consulting people who actually know what they are talking about.
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Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There's plenty of VPS hosting companies that don't need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.
There's also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.
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That's fine. We'll just use Tor instead
They'll just block that too. Can't have a full blown dictatorship without taking away any freedom people have. Better not have a negative opinion about it either.
Holy Fuck 1984 was a warning, not a fucking manual on how to do things.
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Im guessing they'll make it illegal for users to try to bypass the restriction.
Hello China my old friend ....
You can just mail cash to mullvad and include a code that links it to your account.
Clown country
Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.
But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.
21 states have laws for age verification on porn sites. 4 more states are in the process of passing laws for age verification. That's nearly half the states...
Quite insane honestly
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Gee I totally didn't see this coming and made a comment about it earlier. Oh wait I totally did.
The peoples republic of United Kingdom.
A true People's Republic would have less surveillance noncence than this.
The UK is a literal 1984 in the works.
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This is how you get under-18s to use Tor browser
Until the go government starts blocking entry nodes, then there will be a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
Also, this doesn't affect only people under 18, any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
That would put them in the company of China, Russia, and Iran. Getting unrestricted Internet to people in those countries is why I am among those who run a snowflake node on a dedicated VPS (the link also has a simple browser addon -- it's easy to support the network, everyone should)
Yes, these moves suck for UK youth. But, anti-censorship tools do exist, and volunteers like me want people who could benefit from them, to know about & use them.
any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
100% agree, take my upvote
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Look, you are the county that came up with hooligan concept. Do try to apply it locally. I've seen the french act harsher for pettier reasons.
Honestly, it's not been terribly effective, and the ones who stir the most shit usually don't do it for the right reasons.
I feel you, protests in my country are not as effective as french or spanish protests, and usually devolve into large picnics instead.
Because you can't protest in an empty stomach. On the other hand, now we're too full to protest. Let's go home, Benfica is playing today.
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