Thanks for your considered reply, and I do appreciate my initial post was somewhat exaggerated and done in frustration.

Your own evidence, however -- albeit expressed less polemically -- seems indeed to support my conclusion, namely that on a range of measures the UK is indeed more 'free' than the US. Moreover, it is somewhat a large sleight of hand for you to say 'Trump and his oligarchs aside' when Trump is the President and Congress does not seem interested in curtailing his executive power.

Re inequality, I completely agree that the UK does poorly on inequality measures but the data is somewhat ambiguous here. E.g. the OECD picture is closer to what you describe, but the World Bank (which uses the Luxembourg Income Study) paints a different picture:

France: 31.8 Germany: 32.4 UK: 32.4 USA: 41.4

(https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI)

By this measure, the UK is not at all an outlier among the largest EU economies, while the USA is. Moreover, inequality is falling in the UK but rising in the USA so the trend further excacerbates the difference. You can explore many other inequality measures across the USA/UK at https://pip.worldbank.org/# and the picture is very consistent: the USA is less 'equal' across all measures.

I would have to dive into things more to attempt to explain the discrepancy in the two data sources. The Parliamentary report you cite does hint at a partial explanation; the family survey they use doesn't correct for many benefits, which results in an overstatement of inequality. It may also be that the World Bank is total income rather than disposable income but it's not easy to determine their precise methodology (though see https://datanalytics.worldbank.org/PIP-Methodology/surveyest...).

Re so-called pre-crime. All police organisations monitor high risk individuals through increased patrols in hotspots, targeted surveillance, etc. My point I guess is that there is not some binary scale between Minority-Report style precrime units and an hypothesised modern police form that is indifferent to risk factors. It is a scale. The 'precrime' project referred to in the article does not facilitate pre-emptive arrest but appears to provide additional risk data when allocating police resources (and probably helps with parole and rehabilitation strategies too). A touch of suspicion towards the rhetoric of the article is warranted too given the source. In any case, the UK has a long tradition of policing by consent and while there have been some regressions on policing of protest (which I deeply oppose) in general policing in the UK is good and crime is falling.