Not to say there hasn’t been creeping authoritarianism, growing mass surveillance, etc. for the last few decades, but it has seemed that this one issue has stood out as utterly unique, especially in the UK in that there was basically bipartisan accord from those in power across all the mainstream political views, and the only “allowed” position from them was uncritical support for that country’s Government and their military actions.

At the same time, there seemed to be a much larger group of people in the normal population who disagreed with those in power than most other issues (when at least some representatives in a major party might roughly align with the people)