100% agree - we're so close to the US on so much, but miles apart on others. Ring doorbells here break our GDPR regulations, yet if there is a burglary, the Police ask anyone with them to review the footage and let them have it. Legally we can buy scanners and baofeng (and zillions of others) and yet we still have a bit of legislation that says you can't listen. I'm very involved with marine radio, and oddly have a licence for testing and demonstrating them on land? Yet they made me take the test to use them on boats, which I never do? Our police have a country wide system that can, if necessary, be permissioned to connect fire and ambulance who use the same network, but finding a senior officer and then tec support to enable it means they don't. even sillier - their radios have the usual digital features, yet many officers carry two separate identical radios, rather than have one monitoring both nets? I wanted to hire some airband radios to an airfield for an event where one main tower frequency wasn't enough. They wanted to charge me thousands for a frequency for one day, and nothing would shift them. for data protection reasons, many county police forces also insist officers wear earpieces - no public hearing of their radios! We have rules on child protection and privacy, yet most schools use public band radios that dodgy folk could use to their advantage - they use our PMR446 system in most cases, yet they could easily toughen it up with digital. vehicle licence plate cameras are everywhere and they also use these to enforce speeding - as in they read your plate leaving my town at 8.10, but you got to the next time quicker than the speed/distance allows. every car park monitor vehicle's plates now. even small towns have security cameras everywhere - usually run by local councils, but the authorities have access. However - we do NOT have freedom of speech. It's effectively gone despite what our Prime Minister claims. He says we do, yet we have a guy who drives a large panel van to political events all over the country. On the side is a big photo of the prime minister - and it says Kier Starmer is a w*nker. He gets his van seized every single time for 'causing offence'. offence to the man who says we have free speech. Us Brits are a joke. People are proudly flying our union flag, the scottish flag and the welsh flags - everywhere! The authorities are taking them down as quick, because it causes offence to immigrants. It is like a soap opera - apologies for derailing the topic.
