When the Snowden Revelations came out, the US rolled back some of the surveillance, whilst in the UK which had even more invasive surveillance than the US, they go tthe editor of the newspaper which brought out the Revelations fired and passed a law to retroactively make all those practices legal.

This is now at all weird coming from the UK, quite the contrary - it’s totally expected since they’re worse than the US.

Maybe you’re confusing the much higher quality of image management of the UK (in the country that created the word “posh”, projecting the right appearance is traditionally a speciality of the upper classes over there) with the reality of Britain when it comes to civil society surveillance and democratic practices in general.