YES, UK industry is often a byword for rust and, yes, our world profile combines Colonel Blimp with Gary Tank Commander but, fear not, there’s still one area where Britannia still rules the waves: we’re now a world leader in intrusive government surveillance.

Last year, the United Nations special rapporteur on privacy described the UK’s digital regime as worse than Orwell’s 1984. “At least Winston [1984’s protagonist] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen,” he remarked. “Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined.” And those remarks pre-dated the passing of Theresa May’s Investigatory Powers (IP) Bill, better known as the Snoopers’ Charter, coming soon to a computer or mobile device near you.

The IP Bill gives a huge range of government agencies sweeping powers to hack into computers, read emails and track every citizen’s web history. The Tories have been trying to get this monstrosity into law since 2013. Now, after timid opposition in the Commons, it’s been passed by the House of Lords and is awaiting Royal Assent.

The Snoopers’ Charter is draconian, but in truth it won’t necessarily change much. Senior UK judges recently confirmed Edward Snowden’s suggestion that Britain’s security services have been unlawfully collecting confidential data about us for decades. Essentially, the Bill will simply codify, legalise and regularise this ramshackle, fly-by-night spying network and make it the law of the land.

Interestingly, the first efforts to legitimise mass snooping came under Labour. Their Interception Modernisation Programme was being piloted under Gordon Brown and would have gone ahead had he not lost the General Election to Cameron and Clegg.

Even under Jeremy Corbyn, the party offered only the flimsiest resistance. They seemed delighted to get concessions that exclude trade union activities from state surveillance. Wonderful. But of all institutions, trade unions are the most dependent on a culture of openness and personal freedom. The broad atmosphere of state control and police power in the rest of society will ultimately come back to haunt the unions too, with or without concessions.

So, just as when Tony Blair introduced a massive crackdown on civil liberties under the War on Terror, making Britain the world’s CCTV capital, there’s a bipartisan consensus and little official controversy surrounding this. British politics appears strangely unified.

However, Joseph Cannataci, the UN rapporteur quoted above, has issued a stark warning. This Bill isn’t simply a problem for British citizens, who now rank among the world’s most spied-upon people. It’s a broader issue. The Bill’s provisions “run counter to the most recent judgements of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, and undermine the spirit of the very right to privacy”.

Elsewhere, in for example the Netherlands and even the US, privacy campaigners have been winning victories over governments. In Britain, the trend is going the other way. This risks setting ugly precedents.

The Chinese government, for example, explicitly cites the British IP Bill to defend its own intrusive new powers to spy on citizens.

Indeed, dictators across the world will be rejoicing at Britain’s new model surveillance regime. Only five years ago, tech enthusiasts were proclaiming that internet communication would spell the end for authoritarian governments. Social media helped bring down dictators in the Arab world and inspired protests far beyond, including our own “occupy” movements in the West. Naively, many people believed that no country with Twitter accounts would tolerate a world without personal freedom.

Today, authoritarian states have regained the upper hand. Putin and China are stronger than ever. The Arab dictatorships are back in action, and, if Egypt is anything to go by, they’re arguably getting worse. Even in western liberal democracies, the populist, authoritarian right has learned to use social media to its advantage, as Donald Trump and the Leave campaign highlights. Meanwhile, shadowy spying networks are using the apparent openness of the internet against us to develop levels of in-depth knowledge about citizens that would shock and delight East Germany’s Stasi.

Britain is squarely standing with the dictators in this new era. Today, Theresa May announced that “human rights” weren’t an issue when considering trade with countries like Bahrain. Bahrain, we might recall, became the epicentre of the Arab Spring until Britain’s ally Saudi Arabia moved in its tanks to brutally suppress its movement for personal, religious and political freedom. Of course, May’s generosity wasn’t confined to Bahrain, and she also offered extensive new freedoms for UK-Saudi trade.

So, once more, Great Britain has become a shining light and a towering example to authoritarian governments everywhere.

Meanwhile, back home in our sweet land of liberty, maybe it’s about time we stopped using our email and went back to communicating by carrier pigeon: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.