You'd be amazed at the times I've argued with people on HN that free speech infringement by the UK government has grown rampant, only for them to enact the next draconian law a month later.
UK is trying to be like Russia and China, where a minder will show up at your door if you post something the government doesn't like. Then people online will defend it because the investigation didn't turn into a full criminal charge or they say the people simply deserved it.
The reality is this will seriously chill speech broadly across the country regardless of either of those outcomes, and the technical costs of enforcement will be steep.
We don't have any pro-free-speech political parties, nor a written constitution unfortunately.
I mean there are parties that say they like free speech, but it never extends to the sort of speech they disagree with, or by people of the wrong colour/religion/gender etc.
"Most" is probably not accurate. I can't imagine the average middle aged individual in the UK has a VPN they use regularly. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that was the case.
Russia is leading the pack in banning VPNs, and they're, surprisingly, getting pretty good at it. They caught my naive attempts at trying to use Tailscale, WireGuard and OpenVPN immediately. People in government are laughing at the populace struggling to bypass their whitelists, blocks and slowdowns, directly saying that "you can have your VPN, it just won't work, and you will never access anything beyond our Russian sites again. Have fun.". Currently trying to find a way around it using some of the new VPN protocols that popped up trying to bypass the Roskomnadzor DPI, and maybe, I certainly hope, that I will even succeed, but either way they're showing that it's technically feasible.
I really hope for all the people in the UK that your country doesn't go down this route.
CCP "Great Firewall" style.