Brits will say that they don't but if you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything. There are a lot of other native speakers in the UK, for example from Australia or the USA, and you can instantly tell if this person is from the UK or Australia and it's not only the accent that gives away.
Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.
f you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything
Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.
Tbh a lot of the aristocratic address stuff that's still present in other languages is long gone from British English, except for people employed as butlers and people sarcastically mimicking the forms of address used by butlers. Even Americans are more likely to address people as "Sir" than Britons under pensionable age, and English hasn't had the polite second person pronoun most languages do for a long time, never mind involving a dilemma over whether to use a construction that would literally translate as "would your grace..." in everyday interactions to avoid people getting upset by the overfamiliarity of "you"!
We do love deliberate understatement, evasion and saying please a lot though!
British English has a very flat hierarchy, with no T/V distinction as found in French or Russian, and very little use of honorifics or titles (even for authority figures like university professors).
British politeness is not based on hierarchy, but based on (sometimes excessive) apologising for inconvenience.
Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.
> What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy.
Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.
Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.