The UK has been heavily surveilled for several decades, if anything the pace has slowed especially in comparison to the modern US network of CCTV cameras on every doorstep available to the state and "private" survillence apparatus that has taken over.
But it seems mostly due to a revolt against the "two tier Kharmer" policy of the current government: where normal people are jailed for online posts while others are free to break a female policer's nose at the airport and then be let to walk free by the judge and while others also get to rape hundreds of girls on an industrial scale and enjoy a nation-wide cover-up attempt (thankfully foiled) by the state...
By the time the leopards eat their faces, it's too late.
[0] Much like the people who voted for Trump and are now slated for deportation because 15 years ago they cashed a check that bounced, etc.
[1] Also the BBC has some blame here because if they weren't platforming Farage for years when it was unnecessary, it's conceivable that he wouldn't/couldn't have forced first the Tories and now Labour into their hard-right turns and we'd all be better off.
As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.
Farage is one of the few politicians who has opposed these laws. He wants to repeal the Online Safety Act.
That incident was four hundred and twenty years ago. There was no Great Britain, no United Kingdom. Scotland was an independent country.
The UK today is not the same place, not in the slightest.
The underlying argument was essentially the same one used in the US: almost anything is justified if it helps prevent anything they subjectively determine as “terrorism”.
"Tough on crime" and "tough on terrorism" are magic bullets for winning authoritarian support. That's how people are being persuaded that ECHR is a bad thing.
Usually those types are the prime threat to the country.
Farage is in the same position as the Tories currently - he can say whatever he wants because he's not in power and has no responsibility to anyone.
I would be wholly unsurprised that if Reform won a GE and Farage became PM, anything he said before that would be unceremoniously dropped (see: almost every politician who gains power) and, frankly, Farage goes full Trump and, e.g., applies the OSA to censoring everyone he disagrees with.