Matthew Norman: Britain, the spy-camera capital of the world

The only saving grace about the torrent of terrifying news stories that flows at this time of year is that in conjunction they do tend to weaken the impact of one another. Ordinarily, for example, reports that global warming is far more advanced than previously thought would have one asking for a hemlock chaser with the mulled wine. However, when this glad tiding is swiftly followed, as on Wednesday's Newsnight, by the revelation that avian flu has already mutated to resist Tamiflu, you feel more relaxed about climate change. If we're all going to be piled in mass graves by this time next year anyway, what is the point in fretting?

In the light of this festive double whammy, the front page of yesterday's Independent may have struck some as comparatively trivial. From next March, almost every car journey made in this country will be logged by CCTV and satellite cameras, and stored away for future reference on a police database. All right, you think, I should be dead by April anyway, but even if the bird flu never mutates from panic to pandemic, soon enough climate change will force us out of private cars anyway.

In this apocalyptic scheme of things, does it matter if the preposterous Sir Ian Blair of the Metropolitan Police and his trusty plods can press a few buttons and piece together the precise movements of anyone on whom they fancy a snoop? To a clear silent majority, it doesn't. Civil liberties have been out of fashion longer than flares - and whereas flares have their sporadic retro-kitsch returns to vogue, civil liberties do not.

In the United States, people still seem to care about oppressive state interference, albeit this often seems to mean retaining the freedom to buy an automatic at Walmart for about the same as Calista Flockhart and Angelina Jolie would expect to pay for a new-born baby ($44.99). This week's row in Washington over telephone and e-mail surveillance of US citizens would not have exploded here, even if MI5's activities weren't such common knowledge. The glorious Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty would have been wheeled out to express her horror, this paper and a couple of others would have thundered at the iniquity, Charlie Kennedy would have been drowned out attempting to raise the matter at PMQs, and all over the land the sound of indifference would have been thunderous.

If asked about MI5 tapping phones and computers, Mr Blair would fall back on the auto-defence against any such impertinent questioning, by explaining that it is not his policy to comment on matters of national security (unless it's to endorse a paper on WMD put together by a weird student in a Nebraska bedsit in 1993 and lifted wholesale off the internet). Pressed further, he would unleash his "war on terror" cliché du jour. "Look," he would say, "the game has changed."

Yet even he couldn't use that flip argument about the world's first national road surveillance network, partly because suicide bombers seem to prefer buses and trains, and partly because the game of conventional crookery clearly hasn't altered a jot. The only thing to change is technology which now allows cameras on earth and in space to recognise and log car numberplates.

Soon enough, we are told, they will be able to recognise human faces as well. How mortifying is that? And since Britain is the world champion of the spy camera, it will soon be impossible to leave the front door in any vaguely built-up area without a permanent record of your journey being made.

In most rural areas, you will probably be in the clear, but then so were Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four when they went to the country for their first rendezvous. Otherwise, it will depend on class as to whether to expect more or less freedom from surveillance than those in Orwell's satire. The professional middle class will be better off than party members in Nineteen Eighty-Four, since they will be able to move around the home unwatched by a telescreen. The lower-middle and working classes will be worse off, since Orwell's proles were left well alone by the Thought Police.

Any comparison between the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Britain of the near future will strike many as crude, hysterical, and tiresomely obvious. The Big Brother analogy is as automatic a response to perceived threats to civil liberties, after all, as is "the interests of national security" to complaints about covert phone tapping.

Even so, only a fool of the first water could be unaware of the gathering threat to liberty under this uniquely short-sighted and authoritarian government. Whenever the latest nail is hammered into the ever more ferrous coffin of civil liberties, we are assured it will be used only sparingly and in the gravest circumstances. Then an 82-year-old is hauled out of the Labour conference for mild heckling and denied re-entry under new terrorism legislation. A couple of months later, under the same law, a vegan peacenik is arrested for reciting the names of dead British soldiers in Iraq.

Defenders of intrusive technological advances will naturally say that if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear ... the first cousin in the family of phone-in imbecilities to: "If he hadn't done the crime, he wouldn't be standing up there in the dock." The truth is that any threat to liberty, even those primarily designed to increase revenue from car-related fines, will be abused to curtail liberty.

The same geniuses who deemed it necessary to send a dozen officers and several vehicles to nick Maya Evans at the Cenotaph will have access to a complete map of your movements in the car in a few months, and outside the home in a few years.

Do we trust those who oversee the police, but never bothered to interview Sir Ian about his mishandling of the Stockwell killing, to hold them to account when they abuse this information - by selling stories of celebrity number-plate trysts to the tabloids, to mention one banal example of so many? Do we reckon an improved clear-up rate on vehicle crime worth the sacrifice of the fundamental freedom not to have one's entire life in public charted and stored away in a police computer?

And just how depressing is it to know that this time next year, if he survives the flu and the melting of the polar ice cap, an elderly gentleman in Lapland will be kept from his work by letters from all remaining police authorities (three, if we're lucky) citing 127,576 separate offences of speeding, driving without number plates and insurance, and operating a sleigh without due care and attention?