Yes, it is a version of socialism for sure. It's not as absolute as what we had here in socialist Czechoslovakia, when you couldn't own a business and working for the state was mandatory (if you were in a pub or cafe during the work hours, the police would check you and escort you to work).

What the UK/EU etc does now is a growing control of everything through regs and bureaucracy, it's not half as bad as the soviet type (yet), but many things are getting pretty close in the background.

Covid has shown us how much freedom we really have, the bars of the invisible cage were very visible for that moment in time. And while it's not as explicit now, you can still feel them and in some cases the state didn't bother hiding them again.

Not sure if the system can be reformed from the inside. There was some attemps of reforms in socialist Czechoslovakia as well. One has ended up with soviet tanks in the streets of Prague in 1968. Only after the system become really weak in Russia (or whatever happened in 1989) it was possible to make a big reform. It looked to us as if it was dismantled completely back then, but we never realized that the virus had spread westwards and we are sleepwalking into a familiar territory once again.

That said (at least here in Prague) it's still very very very much preferable to pre 1989 Czechoslovakia, it's not even close. Just the alarm bells are ringing louder than ever.