Please forgive me if I try to inject a bit sanity into the discussion.
Firstly, there were EU rules in place, which required ISPs etc to keep records of who contacted who, how long they had to keep them and under which circumstances they were required to disclose this information to the police. These rules were overturned, and the UK government rushes a set of laws through, that put the EU rules back in power at the national level. IOW this is not a sudden introduction of new, sweeping powers to spy on UK citizens, it is merely a continuation of a set of rules already in place. It is also rather dubious whether this qualifies as 'spying on UK citizens', since this is about keeping records that the telephone companies already make, so they can bill their customers. Before the rules were introduced, telephone companies followed their own, internal rules, some keeping records for years while others kept them for a short period.
Requiring telecoms to keep their records for a minimum period of time is actually not exclusively bad, because as a customer you have to right to see your own records, which means that you can actually go back to the company and say 'Look, I never called that premium rate number for 2 hours every day while I was away on holiday, so somebody must have hacked you system'. This is one of the things the telecoms don't like at all, because it costs them money.
Finally, telephone records have been in used for solving crime for many years. Assuming that you are not part of a criminal organisation, you probably don't want large, international gangs - the people smugglers, the drugs cartels, the illegal arms traders, the pedophiles etc etc - to get away with it easily? So, in the absence of keeping telephone records, how to you propose that we, as a society tackle these problems? True, right now it is the job of the police, but in reality fighting crime is in the interest of all and is ultimately everybody's responsibility. So, tell us all, how do we fight international, organised crime without keeping an eye on what everybody is doing? After all, criminals look exactly like anybody else.