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UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network
(libertyinvestigates.org.uk)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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About appearances there's also that everybody has what you're describing in their stereotype of Britain (if not itself, then the Harry Potter universe at least), but feels that there's something "true", "real", "deep", "magical" about it.
It's the feeling that "yes, that's ghoulish, but maybe in the end that's for the better, how do we even know?".
A lot of cheap fantasy books in Russia in the 00s had that feeling too communicated, it's probably one of the things that prevented the Russian society from being alarmed about the regime we have now.
The worst propaganda tool in my opinion, because it makes a person look at mafia and think "it's mafia, but maybe I shouldn't judge it like mafia, what if they're secretly beneficial", or look at jihadist bandits and think the same, or look at a fascist dictatorship and think the same. And worst of all, because in such it exploits openness of mind, as opposed to most other propaganda.
Oh, I don't at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.
In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, "knowing your place" in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.
(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you'll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)
In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they're Working Class) rather than blue collar.
(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it's funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)
Most don't really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that's all that they've known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it's only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.
From the inside - yes, what I meant is that British society is often seen favorably from the outside.
And the comparison to Russia is maybe because this was one of the pictures imagined when thinking "how does a society look when fixed", and the Russian society sees itself as broken, that feels recent, but isn't.
And that picture still affects other societies.
Yeah, I think I get what you mean.
My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it's a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,
People look up to Britain, copy what's done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the "success" of Britain isn't the product of what they do now, it's just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.
That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.