The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate.

So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.

Does street crime in fact continue to fall? I keep hearing about bicycles getting stolen, or how in London, mobile phones get snatched. It was also common to hear how police fails to prosecute various kinds of crime (usually mentioned in contrast to how they do prosecute noncrime crimes such as 'hate speech').

Here, for comparison, is a paragraph from an essay by Konstantin Kisin:

> A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.

Which story is correct?

[0] -https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/theres-good-news-for-brita...

> The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.

That is why they are so keen to backdoor any popular encrypted messaging platform. They can't monitor communications. Unfortunately most people seem to supportive of this. I was quite surprised when my Father (who is a layman) told me he supported this, this is a person that doesn't vote largely for the same reasons that I don't (I think all politicians are awful)..

Additionally. I was listening to someone that engaged at essentially Red Teaming for UK authorities (I forget who it was now). They stated that if you were a dissident, if you kept your activities offline and organise in person the authorities wouldn't be aware of this activity. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible.

Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.

The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.

Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.

I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror

As re reminder, In the UK Palantir holds extensive contracts across defense (multi-billion MoD deals for AI-driven battlefield and intelligence systems) and healthcare (7y £330m+ NHS Data Platform). In France, its involvement is narrower but concentrated on *domestic* intelligence.

It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale.

Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to abuse or as an excuse for abuse, and perhaps because people actually believe in it, they do materialize as one too. Presents as a vicious cycle to me, and as if people were disallowing themselves from recovering of it.

I really have to wonder how much of it is the available options always being just two parties in these territories, and the electoral systems supporting that convergence. In such a scheme, I can indeed definitely imagine people being compelled to vote further and further from their own interests and values, and the slippery slope rhetoric being finding a manifestation.

https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...

God bless Managed Democracy.

I don't really know why the government is doing it. It's not for grand headline reasons, as it's all pretty quiet, for this and for prior changes.

I also really don't think the UK is in the grips of some kind of authoritarian nightmare. If anything, my experience is that it's impossible to convince the police to do anything. These days, surveillance state or not, when your car or phone get stolen, the police write you a crime number to take to the insurers and consider their job done. Even if it's all done for nefarious reasons, this would be an easy sidekick to running a surveillance state that earns the state some cash, and every autocrat likes money. The UK democracy is flawed in many ways, but I really don't think a spy state is currently the problem.

So... Why?

EU dystopia: accelerating (Chat Control)

US dystopia: probably accelerating?

What a time to be alive!

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-...

It isn't precrime or "dissent management" that is the problem, but the engineering of behavior and thought in society where such concepts are acceptable to people.

I don't think we can discuss it in detail here, but with this , chat control, and all sorts of other controversial laws, you'll notice the people of the country actually support that stuff. There is an interesting conversation there about democracy, and the priority of the working class people. Naturally, a person living paycheck-to-paycheck and fighting for healthcare and keeping their job (or getting one) does not care about this stuff. So who does? Not the ruling class. A lot of people (including on HN) who think this stuff is important (rightfully) are not poor people, perhaps middle-class?

Is democracy itself something that can survive, if it is left entirely up to popular vote? Power has gravity, it always wants more. Ideally, there would be institutions that are democratically established and managed that would be trusted to safeguard the people's interests. In the US, there are executive department agencies for example like the FCC, FTC, FDA and more, but they are subject to those in power who are elected by the people.

My "food for thought" here is that similar to supreme courts, there needs to be a regulatory and oversight branch of the government, whose chiefs are apolitical (like actually, not like the US supreme court), well compensated, long-tenured (but not lifetime, more like 20 years), and appointed by confirmation of all other branches of government.

We need to address the problem of power, influence to wield power and incentives for those entrusted with power to act in good faith, but also with good competence. The last part is important, because I have no doubt, a lot of the politicians that come up with this Orwellian nonsense have good intentions, the outcome they seek are noble, just not the means. they just happen to be incompetent when it comes to the subject matter.

Costs overrun, benefits are unclear, and it quietly disappears.

Those responsible resurface later at consultancies, selling the same ideas elsewhere.

In my opinion, 1984 was shaped by his work in Britain.

What they are doing in the UK is more chatting to people involved in gangs and the like to talk them out of screwing up their lives. Kind of common sense.

This has led to "London’s lowest murder rate in more than a decade" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/why-londons-...

There was quite an interesting interview with Sadiq Khan about it yesterday https://youtu.be/SOhIxmYiZRg?t=202 (starting at the crime bit).

The MAGA types love to go on about Khan, who is a lefty Pakistani origin muslim, as being the downfall of London but the reality is kind of different. (typed in central London).

Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US (get shot in the face for protesting about ICE...) get flagged for closure, but putting the boot into the UK for much more wishy-washy issues like this seem to be fair game.

I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues with civil liberties (for example, things like the Online Safety Act are ridiculous) but they are magnified out of all proportion by the US media / social media disinformation megaphone.

This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)

The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.

Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.

I have many bones to pick with the UK government but a large number of people sprinting to these talking points at every chance they get is highly suspicious to me.

Up until this point it was mostly that they would gladly fuck the other countries up but treated their own people way better than the other camp. But this difference is disappearing.

Of course there is always North Korea and other totally fucked up regimes they could use to compare and look white and fluffy

Social movements don’t just happen from grassroots these days. They’re seeded by foreign states. A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting. If you don’t provide an id you get a limited number of views.

And I don’t see anything wrong with a preventative system in principle, we should be able to join up social services information with policing, because we have had cases where a mass murderer has been known to multiple services.

Edit: probably not ids but a token that verifies my nationality would be enough.