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Because you have looked at a few pieces of information and then extrapolated it to an extreme, or you adopted a worldview in 2014 and then haven't updated it since.
Reform is the party with the most momentum in British politics and is on track to form the next government on a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. I am hopeful that what we are seeing with Pathways is the last gasps of a dying culture in British politics, the finger-wagging respectable "adults in the room" with their heads in the sand.
Americans online will sometimes go on about Britain being an authoritarian dystopia, possibly because they've grown up being bombarded with folktales about the tyranny of the British crown and it feels comfortable to follow those well worn grooves, but it's always rung hollow to me. The dystopian part I'm not going to argue about, I'm amazed people can live in certain parts of England without immediately committing suicide, it's a true testament to their mental fortitude that they don't look out the window in the morning and immediately ram their heads into it and slit their throats on the broken glass. But the British political establishment isn't authoritarian, they are far too ineffectual for that, instead they nag and tut and wag their fingers. Britain does not have gulags, what it has instead is this kind of vaguely condescending and ineffectual propaganda paired with equally condescending and ineffectual harassment.
I'm sure a libertarian may feel the urge to crawl out of the woodwork here and try to bring up some protestors being arrested for being mean or a video of a policeman standing outside someones door looking like an idiot as they try to caution the homeowner for a mean tweet, but that just makes my point. I'm sure to some this is indistinguishable from 1984 and the jackboot of the Nazis, but to actual authoritarians this is laughable, it's like one of those comedy bits where the camera pans over a list of hardened criminals and then stops at Bill from accounting, who is also there.
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