Small plate grief in Gwent

Just returned from a long weekend in mid and south wales with two of my friends. We arrived on sat night and planned to tour wales from sunday onwards. 10 minutes into our sunday tour we were stopped by gwent police who told us that we had done nothing wrong of which we already knew but they wanted to talk to us about road safety as there had been a number of road deaths in the area over the past few weeks. Great i dont mind that at all. but as soon as we took our helmets off the police honed into our numberplate size. we then got a lecture on the legal requirement of plate size etc. yes our number plates were smaller than the legal requirement but we are talking about 3cm. Another officer was radioed to come and photograph the plates; £30 fixed fines issued and dvla will be informed. What ever happend to discretion? our no plates could clearly be seen at distance. we were kept at the roadside for 50 minutes. We were given information on atending one of their safety road ride outs of which the last one was the 16th of september. None of our bikes were checked ie tyres etc or anything else to do with safety such as speed. “SPEED KILLS” so they keep telling us. we were told that only bikes were going to be stopped and not other vehicles. After we got on our way we were stopped 5 miles down the road for the same thing. What a waste of time and resources, to my knowledge an illegal no plate has not been a contributary factor to a fatal road death. The issue here was clearly revenue and the numbers game. after the bad summer they clearly had not raked in enough revenue. our holelier told us that actions of the police were affecting his buisness as other bikers had told him of applying the letter of the law to the extreme as a result they would be going else where. is the uk becoming a police state?