That's absolutelly, 100%, traditional London Tube.
It would probably have worked just fine Friday evening down at the pub but then again the kid wouldn't be allowed in.
Still UK has a tradition of a more humane society and not as cutthroat brutal as USA, so I think the level of sociopathy in society is lower in UK than in USA.
That's the thing, it doesn't.
The UK was incredibly inhuman in the time of the Empire, committing several genocides abroad (to the point that Churchill, before his greatest and highly celebrated moments during WWII, presided to once such Genocide in India) not just against the people who they ruled abroad but also against their own people (for example, they replaced Slavery with Indentured Servitude, a similar system but targetting their own poor and based on Debt, and who can forget the Workhouses of the 19th Century).
The post war period with a genuinelly leftwing Labour party, the growth of Unions, Worker Rights, broadenning coverage of Education and the creation of the National Health Service and Social Security, was the exception to literally centuries of crushing, extreme inequality and has been in reversion since the 70s.
What Britain does have is amazing cultural propaganda (unsurprisingly in the nation which IMHO, has the greatest Theatre culture in the World) that relentlessly pushes a whitewashed version of the nation (for example, all of productions about the Victorian era embelish it with none showing such details as how back then, when the lord and lady of the manor passed servants in a corridor, the latter had to turn to the wall and could not look at them).
The problems of Britain are far deeper and more ancient than mere Russian Propaganda (though that was a wonderful excuse for the local parties to excuse their at best ineptia after Brexit) and are entrenched in just how deeply stratified and conservative British Society (especially the English one) is, not to mention the quite high levels of Nationalism and delusions of National Superiority that are constantly fed by both the Press and Politicians.
(I was there during the Leave Referendum campaign and one of the problems the Remain side suffered was that the politicians campaigning for it - mostly from New Labour - had been in Government themselves and had used the EU as scapegoat for their own unpopular measures as well as eagerly participated in the whole blame-the-EU trend from the Press, so they if they openly mentioned most of the good things about the EU and British membership of it, that would go against the lies they themselves had once said about the EU)
Not to exonerate Russia, but most of the external support for Brexit came from America - for example Cambridge Analytica was paid by rich Americans, not Russia.
I mean, I used to think like you, and then I went to go and live in the bloody place for more than a decade and English society isn't at all "social", unless by social you mean Racist and incredibly stratified (think the Indian Caste System, though a bit less bad and not as overt). Things there really are massivelly rigged for inequality and very low social mobility. Probably explains why the social conquests of the post-WWII period were so easilly reverted and now even Labour is running around parroting "the Poor are lazy" propaganda and passing laws to punish the poor for being poor, IMHO the very opposite of "social".
I could go on about the general behaviour I've observed in British society when it comes to were one is in the social ladder and others elsewhere in that ladder, or about the process through Public Schools and Oxbridge which makes sure the scions of the elites remain elite, but this is already far too long a post, so I'll leave you with "just" this wall of text.
I went to the UK in the 00s were I rode the boom, then the 2008 Crash, then Austerity and all the way to Brexit, leaving just before it came into effect.
My opinion of Britain when I moved there was very good, my opinion when I left was the the country had entered the final stage of post-Imperial decay and was fucked. If you look around at nations who were once heading empires (Italy, Egypt, Greece, even Spain and Portugal), IMHO you can get a pretty good idea of were ex-Empires end up in and how long the decay can last.
Corbyn elected leader of the Labour Party was my last hope for that country and the massive campaign to oust him involving pretty much the entire Press and most of the Parliamentary Group of his Party (who were all from the New Labour faction of the party) for me pretty much proved that the entire system is completelly rigged an unable to move anywhere but further rightwards. The behaviour of the New Labour faction after they stole power back from the leftwing of the party - mainly the purges - and subsequently in Government - more rightwing than ever, in some way straying into the far-right - just confirmed that impression.
Frankly given the highly propagandistic Press environment in the UK and what was already a deeply flawed partial implementation of Democracy to begin with, I really can't see any path were the UK would become merely more like Scandinavia (i.e. more Social Democrat) rather than more Fascist - the tendency of the elites in Britain was always towards Fascism (just look at how much the loved the Nazi ideas back in the 1920s before Germany started invading neighbouring countries, with there even being a picture of the previous queen as a child being taught to do a Nazi salute by her uncle, the then King) and the "know your place" mindset never left the society, and to me all that has been happening since Thatcher - from the destruction of Unions to the capture and consolidation of the Press, down to the capture of the Labour party by the moneyed elites, consolidated by the anti-Corbyn coup and subsequent internal purges - has been the elites in Britain wresting back control by subverting the few working mechanisms of Democracy in Britain.
So far what I've expected when I left Britain in disgust after the Leave vote has been happening (though Corby was unexpected and a bit of hope, but the methods used to crush him just confirmed my impression of how thoroughly captured and subverted the system is in Britain), just slower than I expected.
I'm sorry for anybody who is a Leftwinger in the UK and doesn't even have another nationality to be able to move to a place with an actual Future for themselves and their children.
The kind of people who leave because they're dissatisfied with their employer are the ones who more easilly find jobs elsewhere, and those are generally the most competent and/or in higher demand hence harder to find replacements for.
Whilst there is a subset of highly competent and in high demand people who just stick with their employer no matter what (be it because they're highly adverse to change or just fearful), in my experience those tend to spent most of their professional career in one or two employeers and professionally suffer from the problem of "never having seen more than one way of doing things" so are IMHO (and as far I could see when I crossed paths with such people) limited in how far they can grow as professionals because they only really know one or two styles of working environment.
That said, "modern" management is short-termist and doesn't invest in people, so they repeatedly short-change and generally shaft people for the sake of their own next bonus, in the process losing the capabilities for competitive advantage versus the competition or merely mid and long term efficiency.
That's not as much a difference as one might think because the flour too is mainly "sugar", specifically it's starch which gets turned into glucose same as the sweet tasting sugars (side note: it's quite an interesting process since saliva itself containes enzymes that break the starch into glucose and you can actually test this yourself using iodine solutions - which you should be able to get from a pharmacy - which turns starch purple).
Ultimatelly when it comes to nutrition, you should care mainly about carbohydrates in general (which includes all the stuff that is not sweet tasting but gets turned into glucose by the human body) rather than sugars specifically.
Once you look at it this way you'll find out that a ton of stuff which is not sweet is none the less rich in "sugars", namelly things like bread, pasta, polished rice and so on.
The Leave Tory government pretty much aped the first Trump presidency in terms of policies, only as public school educated scions of the moneyed elites they were posh(ish) rather than loud and brash like Trump.
The New Labour government is currently aping the Democrat Party after Trump, only they're possibly even more rightwing than the Democrats were in that period.
(And overlaying all this there are things like Britain having a far more extreme civil society surveillance system than the US and which, unlike in the US, was not walked back after the Snowden revelations but instaed was rectroactivelly made legal, plus Britain does not have a written Constitution so a simple Parliamentary majority gives close to absolute power).
If the trend continues the next UK Government will be led by Farage or an even more radicalized Boris Johnson trying to tear down whatever little Democracy the UK still has.
The core difference to the US is that Britain is and has been for long far more culturally heavy in "know your place" than the US (it now seems the post-War period of worker rights and a more egalitarian society was the exception, not the rule) and the British moneyed elites are far more dynastic in nature than the ones in the US (we're talking centuries of upper class status being inherited, not a mere 2 or 3 generations).
As I explained above, the leadership of the party currently in Government in Britain - the Labour Party - and hence the entire cabinet, literally owe their posts to a campaign of accusations of anti-semitism against the previous leader of their party (who was from the leftwing faction of the party rather than the neoliberal faction - aka New Labour - as the current one) with massive help from Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in the UK.
That campaign was so extreme that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was accused of being an anti-semite as means to taint said previous leader by association and was kept going at full throttle through an election causing the Labour Party to lose it which ultimatelly brought down that leader. Over time it was shown that the party under that leader was actually less anti-semite than the general British society, but by then the damage was done and he had been ousted, with the neoliberal faction taking control of the party again (they have an anti-democratic system for controlling who gets to run for party leader, so they'll make sure no leftwinger ever gets the chance again - the other guy only got to run as candidate to party leader to be the token opposition since nobody expected him to win it, but he did).
The current PM is the guy who got elected to lead the party following all that.
Effectivelly the British Government was bought by Israel, not with money but with Propaganda that leveraged the large Jewish community in Britain, specifically the most rightwing amongst them who are rabidly pro Israel. This is why the current British Government unwaveringly supports Israel and their mass murdering or amongst others tens of thousands of children.
I've lived for over a decade in Britain (and left with Brexit) and was even involved in politics there before I left (fair disclosure: I was a Green Party member) as well as having lived in other countries in Europe and in my opinion Britain has already gone "as corrupt malignant and stupid on us as USA" years ago, they're just far posher about it (than both the US and pretty much all far-right politicians in the rest of Europe) plus they have far slicker propaganda, so people outside the country can't really spot it easilly and those inside the country - most of whom are stuck in an English-language bubble as most Brits speak no second language - generally can't tell how far to the Right not just their Politics but their Press is compared to most of Europe.
And don't get me started on how the civil society surveillance aparatus in Britain revealed by Snowden was worse than in the US and in Britain, unlike in the US, they didn't walk back on it at all but instead just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, the Editor of the main British newspaper in reporting those relevelations - The Guardian (which, by the way, is Liberal not Leftwing) - was kicked out and the Press suddenly went quiet on all of it and haven't mentioned it since.
By the time I left Britain, I tought it was the country closest to Fascism in all of Europe (except perhaps Hungary) and the transition from a Government of the Tories (who were worse than Trump during their first presidency IMHO, only far posher) to a New Labour government (i.e. Labour under the Israel-installed leadership) barelly walked it back.
If you think about it, in some ways British politics is somewhat a mirror of the politics in America (and remember that Britain too has a First Past The Post electoral system) only less brash and loud, partly because the culture of the elites in Britain (especially England) is very heavy on inculcating in their children a certain way of being which is heavy on presenting a false image of oneself and saying the "right" things (just look up what the Brits mean with "Public school educated", which by the way doesn't mean educated in state schools but actually in private and very expensive schools).
I just went and say Rogue One immediately after the last episode of Andor, and whilst things do tie neatly at all levels from the end of Andor into Rogue One, the focus changes from Andor to Jyn and whilst you don't really notice a disjunction in how the characters were played between one and the other, the character depth is naturally a lot less in Rogue One.
What does change massivelly is the style of story - Andor is about people (in imaginary circumstances), Rogue One is just an action rollercoaster - and the pacing which is very different between the Series and the Film (as expected, both from the difference in length and the style of story).
It was also interesting to notice how small the role of Senator Mothma was in Rogue One compared to how big it is in Andor - a few other minor characters in Rogue One do get much more fleshed out in Andor but the Senator has by far the most extreme difference in story presence between one and the other.
The current leadership of the British party which is now in Government has a MASSIVE personal debt to Israel and Israeli-linked Jewish Organisations in Britain for their campaign to oust the previous leader of the party - the first actual leftwinger elected to it since the 80s - using accusations of anti-semitism which were so wild that at one point a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was repeatedly said to be an anti-semite for what he said in a conference for Palestine, as a means to claim that Labour leader was an anti-semite by association (they sat in the same panel in that conference).
Israel delivered Sir Keir Starmer the top position at the party which was the next in line to get into Government and hence his premiership and Sir Keir Starmer is paying them back by having Britain help Israel mass murder Palestinian children.
The very Prime Minister of the British Government (as well as pretty much the whole of the Labour leadership) has been bought by Israel, not with money but with the greatest favour in their lives.
AOC recently voted in favour of an ADL supported definition of "anti-semitism".
So I'm sorry but whatever leftwing sounding stuff she says has to be assumed to be purely theatre, same as when the DNC assholes claim to care about workers, the poor or minorities.
You can't be a Leftwinger and support ethno-Fascists like the Zionists at the same time, so one has to conclude from her own actions that AOC's "leftwing character" is purelly performative and basically the ideology-free business strategy of crafting an image that differentiates oneself from the competition whilst not in fact being any different.
Whomever is the inheritor of Bernie's politics, it ain't her.