The British government is persisting in its horrible plan to collect details (though not, thank goodness for small mercies, the content) of every telephone call, email and visit to a webpage made in the UK. It has presented its plans to the industrial companies who would be affected by them, either because they carry the traffic or could be involved in development. But the exact plans for this hyper-surveillance are being kept from the British public, which will be expected to (a) acquiesce to it, and (b) pay for it.

Lord Avebury of the Liberal Democrats has asked, quite properly, for the Powerpoint slides of the presentation to be made public, in order that there might be a sensible debate about it. It is possible that the public will agree that such surveillance is justified in an age of cybercrime and global terror. But without a public debate, any “agreement” is of course meaningless. The plan may be sensible; the secrecy is an outrage.

But then, outrageous infringements of civil liberties have been a trademark of the Labour governments of 1997 onwards. Jacqui Smith’s refusal to see liberty and privacy as important values in British society is only part of a trend. We should deplore her attitude, but recognise that it is not her fault as an individual, but rather the most conspicuous failure of the ideology of the ‘Third Way’.

And, of course, once the technology is perfected and paid for from the British science and engineering budget, it will constitute a marketable resource which can, and will, be sold on to other interested parties, such as totalitarian governments the world over.

Occasionally, the fatuous argument is made that if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear. This is garbage. As I have argued before, it would be more correct to say that if one has nothing to hide, and the government keeps within the law, and its employees keep within the law, and the computer holding the database doesn’t screw up, and the system is carefully designed according to well-understood software engineering principles, and the Treasury doesn’t try to micromanage the implementation, and the system is maintained properly, and the government doesn’t scrimp on the outlay, and all the data are entered carefully, and the police are adequately trained to use the system, and the system isn’t hacked into, and your identity isn’t stolen, and the local hardware functions well, you have nothing to fear.

That is a somewhat different proposition, but probably doesn’t fit Labour’s simplistic Manichaean world of goodies and terrorists, where the only thing preventing the ultimate victory of the forces of good is the lack of technology that – it goes without saying – will function perfectly, be unhackable and only be used for good purposes. Our only hope is the government’s traditional incompetence in the implementation of large software systems; probably the best outcome is that it wastes a couple of billion on something that doesn’t work.