It helps that Britain ... has a curiously complacent attitude to civil liberties

These would be liberties like universal healthcare? Or perhaps the right to roam? Or what about when Britain made it a moral point to get its citizens out of Guantamo?

How about concepts like "Police don't need to carry guns day-to-day to do their jobs"? I've spoken here on HN about getting out of the car during a traffic stop because I was tired of the subtle power play where the police talk down to you while you're sitting. I had several responses, serious responses, from Americans saying that I was crazy because I was likely to be shot. Even after clarifying that I'm not being aggressive, just getting out of the car and even proactively handing over my license, they were resolute that such actions could lead to me being shot. Is this, as the author claims, the result of a population that expects their government serves them? What a citizen should expect, rather than a subject, to be so fundamentally afraid of being murdered by their own police despite having done no wrong?

There are things that are 'civil liberties' that are not listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. 'Civil liberties' are a grab-bag of things, and the US has nowhere near a monopoly on them, and while the CCTV surveillance is bad in the UK, it's not the be-all and end-all of 'civil liberties'.

Similarly, counter to the article's statement that US citizens expect their government to serve them and UK 'subjects' expect to serve their government, this simplistic statement is entirely undone by the attitude towards healthcare - a fundamental part of human life, where the expectation of the individual is the opposite of the author's statement. In healthcare, the UK citizen expects the government to serve them, the US citizen doesn't. It's not just healthcare - there are plenty of fields where if something is not ideal, the UK expectation is for the government to fix it, and the US expectation is for private enterprise to fix it. Hell, even the phenomenon of welfare dependence, rife in some areas of the UK, comes from the expectation that the government owes the individual something.

They violate no Bill of Rights or written constitution because Britain has neither.

A British lawyer put me to rights very clearly on this point: the UK does have a constitution. It's in an arrangement of documents that all together describe how the country is run - there just isn't a document with the title 'The Constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland'. Americans put an unusual highlight on the citizen's rights provided by the constitution - usually a nation's constitution is mostly how the political apparatus is arranged: there are two political houses, upper and lower; representatives are elected this way; judicial system has these powers and is selected that way; so on and so forth. The UK definitely has documents describing how it is run politically.

Keep in mind also that if you worship in particular the US Bill of Rights, you're missing out on the amendments that outlawed slavery and allowed universal suffrage. The US Bill of Rights is far from complete. Given also that constitutions don't usually go into human rights in detail, all this kind of criticism boils down to is sensationalism.