Indeed. This is not corporate regulation, it's social regulation.
Social authoritarianism is the driving force in English politics, and it's a big vote-winner in the tabloid- and telegraph-reading constituency. It's also the message that's easiest to flog on social media, since all you have to do is trigger outrage and critical thinking goes out of the window.
Liberality is probably more popular, but it's erased by our ghastly electoral system. (Scotland may as well whistle for a say, and I would advise them to secede.)
The tories are generally anti-worker and pro-big-business. There was a blip as the Brexit nutters seized power - brexit being anti-everything - but the tories reverted to type with Liz "Lettuce" Truss and Rishi "literally a billionaire" Sunak.
Upshot? Forget regulation that might impinge on the free market or protect workers, but prepare your anus for a sequence of civil-right-ectomies.
In fact, in my middle age, I cannot recall a home secretary that has not been more illiberal than the last. David Blunkett; John "Dracula" Howard; Theresa "culture of hostility" May; Chris "remove
books from prisons" Grayling; now we're up to Suella "ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda" Braverman. These people are FUCKING CUNTS, ffs, when they were dropped at birth they should have been dropped from much higher.
I despise Westminster, the two-party system, the capture of media by capital interests, and the vegetative English electorate. I could get myself an EU passport... but where is better? Fascism is close to the surface, everywhere in the first world I look.