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There are no self-enforcing laws. There are no laws that can be relied on to apply themselves fairly. Laws are not code. Fairness comes from transparency and a comrehensive system of review.
Except that's not my point. Police and courts have biases. That's true everywhere. And some laws on the books are manifestly unjust: stop-and-search and the extreme and arbitrary restrictions on peaceful demonstrations, to name two. My point is more that, due to human nature and resource constraints, UK police cannot be arsed to enforce most laws in full zero-tolerance mode. That's not "trust the police" exactly, more "trust the police to be lazy and understaffed." In the US, there are about 600k police for a population of 350M. In the UK, that number (depending on how you count admin and community-support roles) is 14 to 17k for a population roughly 1/6 the size. Taking the larger UK number, the US has about 6 times more cops per capita than the UK has (and that doesn't count the National Guard, which is now being deployed in a policing role). So where is pervasive oppression more likely? I'd say it's where there are more jackboots on the ground. And that's what we've been seeing under Trump.
The big difference between the UK and 1980s East Germany is that there's no pervasive network of informers in British neighborhoods. The Stasi had around 189,000 snitches in a population af about 16M people, and the full apparatus to run them. In the UK, there's a lot of passive surveillance (CCTV and ANPR, for example) but relatively little CCTV is centrally controlled: most of it is in the hands of private businesses and individuals (Blink doorbells and similar gadgets are a large percentage of todal coverage). The evil curtain-twitching nosy types in the UK are more preocculpied with ratting out their neighbors over compliance with bin regulations and other trivia, not reporting on opinions or who's meeting whom.
My point is that the police definitelly "can be arsed to enforce certain laws in full" if the right people tell sufficiently highly placed people in the right police force to enforce them strictly.
This is called "selective enforcement" and is definitelly the kind of shit you see in countries were Rule Of Law is weak, like Latin American dictatorships.
The system is designed with overbroad laws with lax enforcement exactly so that even though the actual law as written is draconian, common people don't normally get hit by it so they don't feel it is draconian, yet at the same time when the "right" people desire it they can make enforcement go from lax to strict against specific people or groups of people who thus get hit by the draconian elements of the law.
What you wrote is a great example of how those laws are de facto fine for most people most of the time because in their own life they never see the law applied to its full extent and thus many will even form a positive opinion of those laws because as long as the enforcement of those laws is lax and doesn't include the most draconian provisions, those laws work fine (or don't even get used, so they're not seen as a problem)
Meanwhile the laws can be applied in a strict way and to their full extent, so people in positions of power can arbitarilly (and I emphasise "arbitrarilly" because it's the very opposite of how Justice should be applied) order it to be used with full force against specific targets, which is exactly what Starmer is doing now with some of the crazier anti-Terror legislation in the books.
Selective enforcement turns Law Enforcement into a weapon which can be pointed at the enemies of people with sufficient power.
Proper Justice Systems try very hard to avoid selective enforcement situations because that's are the very antithesis of "Everybody is treated the same in the eyes of the Law" (i.e."The Law is blind") core principle in Justice - everybody is not treated the same in the eyes of the Law when a political figure can tell the Met Commissioner and the CPS to "throw the book at these specific demonstrators" and those demonstrators are then arrested and charged using elements of certain laws which nobody else ever has applied against them.