Have the claims that the UK is an authoritarian police state been overused?

The countless articles that claim that the UK is on the rocky road, or has already arrived, at an authoritarian police state, show that there are a lot of people in this country who are concerned about the direction our politics has taken. It is easy to gloss over what these claims actually mean, waving them away as conspiratorial claptrap.

http://planetquo.com/Police-State-Britain

However, why would so many people take so much time and effort to write about their concerns? They serve them no political purpose, they get no economic gain from them, they are rational and concise people. The reason is simple, these people looked at examples of past societies that have had an unhealthy social control over their citizens and have seen similarities between those regimes and our own outstanding society. (If you don't think we have an outstanding country, it is in all our interests that we do whatever we can to change it for the better.)

I am not suggesting for a minute that our own government is anything like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Communist China, but there is no getting away from the fact that a government that seeks such absolute control over the people it is supposed to serve, may not have totally innocent motives. If they do have innocent motives now, putting a ring of steel around each individual is putting the mechanisms into place that could be misused by future governments.

We know what it feels like to live in our country, and going about our everyday lives, the surveillance about us is not always immediately evident. Apart from seeing the cameras, and knowing that we could be watched, it is hard to see straight away the impact that surveillance could have on us. But as with other authoritarian regimes, it is difficult to characterise our country as such, because what does that feel like? Often the revelation is felt by the country's population when it is too late in the day to act.

Our police force have been granted almost unbelievable powers in regard to law enforcement, and still they ask for more. It could be argued that the government is using excessive police powers to suppress any social, economic and political act that contradicts their policies. In doing this they pervade every part of our lives, and require rigorous compliance. It is this perception of the state of our country that has led so many to come to the conclusion that we are allowing our government to have an authoritarian hold over us.

This is of course my own opinion, and I may be misreading the evidence I think is plain to see. I hope I am wrong, in the years to come I may laugh at the conclusions I have come to. If I am only half right though, I want to be able to look my children square in the eye and tell them that I did everything, however small, that I could to aid the disquiet felt by the people in this country about their surveillance culture.