And so what’s your threshold for calling a spade a spade? Is a trowel a spade? Is a spoon a spade? Is a flat bit of wood a spade?

Do you understand the concept of neuance or shades of grey or do you doggedly stick to black and white?

Must be blissfull to see the world with strict category boundaries and be willingly ignorant of anything on a spectrum that doesn’t fit into your nice and neat categories.

Not my thing, but you do you boo.

I have yet to see UK election officials being caught on CCTV stuffing ballet boxes.

I have yet to see the Police arresting people for being gay in public.

I have yet to see the BBC be handed notes live on air and completely change the narrative around an ongoing war.

So yeah, the original comment saying “the UK is more authoritarian than Russia” is insane hyperbole.

Ironically, your comment about the UK being halfway to as authoritarian as somewhere like Russia is more interesting as we can get into the details as how they are currently similar and how much further the UK would have to slide to be there, and presumably how to stop it.

See this here u/Jhex, this is a comparison that makes sense because it is a criticism of the “surveillance state” by comparing numbers of CCTV cameras between a parliamentary democracy with free and fair elections and an authoritarian state which does not and highlights that whilst one has much more political freedoms they both have a large surveillance state apparatus and you’d expect one of them to have a smaller one.

No, I think we can acknowledge the problems surrounding digital ID, the surveillance state, prosecuting whistleblower journalists who leak classified information, and many other problematic policies and institutions WITHOUT resorting to a rediculous comparison and insane hyperbole.

Please explain how the UK is now more authoritarian than Russia; a country that rigs elections, disappears/assassinates political opposition, and invades neighbouring sovereign nations to ethnically cleanse them?