It's a combination of unprecedented wealth (let's be honest, modern poverty in industrialized countries is nothing like it was back in the '50s) and the continuous rise of asymmetric warfare randomly deployed by psychopaths. In Sydney, the "cafe kidnap" attack is still fresh in everyone's mind. We've had bombs in London and Madrid, plus a number of other scares, and when a population feels threatened, they'll typically hand power to the first dictator with a minimum of skill. As long as we're free to buy porn and videogames, most people just don't care.
Did they react this way during the Troubles? I don't think they did. I was in London in '92 and there was a bomb threat called in at the tube station one stop over. It delayed the train for a bit, but that was it and everyone continued on like normal.
This time the US freaks out because the world came to their doorstep and they flip out because they have no idea how to handle it. The leaders flip out causes the population to freak out and they trun around and grant legal weight to every stupid idea that comes flying out of polititians mouths.
It seems the UK learned from this, so when there is a little bomb plot in London, the leaders go full retard, the people get scared and do the same thing.
It's like everyone figured out the best way to get more power is to act like you've been caught with your pants down so that you're the one who scared the population, not whatever actually happened. After everyone has finished running around like a chicken with it's head cut off and the dust settles, the government finds itself with all these extra powers.
This technique was first theorized and practiced by CIA in Europe (and likely KGB elsewhere) during the Cold War. In Italy they called it "Tension Strategy", as in "keeping people tense" with fear of attacks and bombs so they will allow the government to get and maintain illiberal powers or even allow a Chilean-style coup d'état.
During the Troubles, the UK had its fair share of "freaking out", banning public bins (only recently re-introduced), criminalizing the Irish community, and basically allowing police and military to do whatever they wanted in Northern Ireland (with lots of abuses being recognised and pursued only today). A famous Irish comedian joked a few years ago that he loved all Muslims, because they've now replaced the Irish as standard bogeymen ("... and now us Irish are just those funny people from Riverdance!").
The "Tension Strategy" was an allegation made by Italian Communist Party, which was unhappy with the influence of American political ideas in Italy post-WWII. Trying to pass it off as accepted historical fact, as you have done, is dishonest.
> banning public bins (only recently re-introduced)
They were banned in train stations and other similar areas, for the fairly sensible reason that they'd been used to hide bombs in those locations in the past.
Did they react this way during the Troubles? I don't think they did
Mainland UK was left largely alone, although the news was subject to bizarre censorship (Gerry Adams having to speak through a proxy, for example) and they took all the bins out of railway stations.
Northern Ireland was subject to military occupation, with overt armed checkpoints, occasionally military firing on civilians (although not with the same level of impunity as US police), secret police and informants running around, and widespread street violence.
I understand that the British government did a lot during the Troubles. For one, the right to remain silent was weakened. Special counterterrorism units were created ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Reaction_Force ), which were accused of committing several crimes. And, although it wasn't an official policy, businesses added enough closed circuit television cameras that it became impossible to pull off anonymous attacks in London.
Well, it's a bit more complex than that. I lived int he UK from 1988-95 and a few years after, and I'm Irish. There wasn't a collective freakout, but there was institutionalized discrimination; for example you could be held for longer than the usual statutory period, without communication and without access to a lawyer, based on suspicion of terrorism. There were quite a few Irish people falsely imprisoned because they were made scapegoats for terrorist bombings, and political prisoners were kept in dreadful conditions (and the UK is not known for having especially humanitarian penal policies to begin with). For a long time, Britain governed Northern Ireland with an iron hand and there was far worse treatment of the Catholic minority there than could reasonably be justified by security concerns - and I would not characterize myself as an Irish Republican or anti-UK, indeed I sometimes wonder if Irish political independence was necessarily a good thing. Bear in mind that during the 1980s the UK government was still offering support to the Apartheid regime in South Africa and so forth.
On a personal level, that meant if you were Irish you had to expect your passport to be checked very rigorously, expect different treatment from police, and endure a fair degree of social static; back in 1992, for example, people might exhibit a stiff upper lip when it was announced that the tube was delayed, but when I would meet them at work later I'd know there had been a bomb scare because I'd hear a crack about whether I had a bomb in my briefcase or somesuch. furthermore, Irish terrorism was different in a few ways. First, in Northern Ireland it was counterbalanced by unionist terrorism against the Catholic/Irish republican minority, so a lot of the terrorism you'd hear about there was of the tit-for-tat tactical variety. In London, the IRA called in far more bomb threats than it detonated bombs, and it generally avoided bombing civilians but struck political and military targets - with a disproportionate level of effectiveness, which is one reason that London is awash in CCTV cameras. IRA terrorists killed a lot of senior people in the British establishment, from government minister to members of the royal family. They launched very few attacks on civilians on the mainland, and virtually all attacks on the mainland were carried out in London, the seat of government, or at places where high-value targets happened to be. Most of the country never saw a bomb threat because it was too far from any sort of political/military target. The IRA understood asymmetrical warfare extremely well and had no desire to provoke a wave of popular resistance or anger of the kind that comes from indiscriminate civilian bombing.
Saying the UK had this sort of thing all figured out and then US reaction to 9/11 caused them to turn dictator is just hopelessly un-anchored from reality and at odds with the long historical context. I see why it seems that way to you, but I assure you that things were/are quite a bit more complex than that.
This kind of thing was rampant in the 1910s and 1960s (with the communists and anarchists in the earlier case and various disaffected and political groups in the later). They were also periods of high growth in wealth.
