Barring evidence otherwise, I believe it's reasonable to conclude the situation in the UK is similar, or at minimum, that we don't know that warrants in the UK are an adequate protection. Unfortunately I don't know of information about this that is specific to the UK.

> you keep broadening out the terms of the discussion further and further, rather than addressing any of the specific factual claims in my posts.

I apologize. I did and do concede that referring to the proliferation of mostly (mostly) private CCTV in the UK as "government spying" is incorrect. I did not address the other claims you made because I agree with or believe them or think they're likely true and didn't bother investigating (such as a warrant requirement to take private CCTV footage, and that the police rarely bother to request CCTV footage). I see how that can create a frustrating feeling of getting nowhere.

But while I don't dispute the latter two facts (in fact I think we agree on all factual issues so far), I disagree with the implication that this diminishes the surveillance state, or that the problem is limited to how warrants are issued.

While the police/government may only rarely request CCTV footage, the possibility is there, which is enough to establish chilling effects, especially for groups that may fear selective enforcement, where more resources are expended to suppress them than what is afforded to regular crime.

This is how the US government defended their illegal bulk surveillance PRISM program - that while they collected data on everyone, they had strict (so they say) limits on who humans working there looked at, and that only what humans look at counts as a "search".

And while I do have a problem with how liberally warrants are granted, that would not be such an issue if there was less data for the warrants to request in the first place. Recent history has shown that once the infrastructure for surveillance is built, purely legal means are rarely effective in restricting its use.