IN his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said that “Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual.” Little noticed among the cascade of pronouncements about constitutional reform, was a promise to reconsider the ban on unlicensed political protest in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Mr Brown implied that when it came to balancing the need for public order with the right to public dissent, this was a law too far.

A commitment to personal liberty is only to be expected from a British prime minister, and especially from a son of the manse brought up in Adam Smith’s home town. Yet Mr Brown sat in a Cabinet that did more than any other in recent years to alter the balance in the relationship between the State and the individual.

If Clement Attlee is remembered for post-war welfare provision and the NHS, Harold Wilson for Sixties optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze then we will look back on the past ten years as marking a serial assault by the State on the civil liberties of the citizen.

To be sure, the State always wants to limit the liberties of its people. But it is normally restrained by an executive that understands the limits of illiberalism or is contained by a parliament that considers itself to be a guardian of freedoms.

For a number of reasons, neither of these brakes was applied under Tony Blair’s premiership. The huge Commons majority he enjoyed, the craven pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords ¬ and, to an extent, in the courts – conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed in modern peacetime.

It is often easier to recognise the State than define it. It is not simply the Government. It is the agglomeration of all those offices and agencies whose raison d’etre is to run the country. It is the body politic. It is the supreme public body within the sovereign political entity. Every nation needs a State to function; but it needs also to contain its aggrandisement. We all know what happens when the State becomes over-mighty.

Under Mr Blair, the State recaptured territory that it must have thought had been buried forever under a mountain of human rights laws and beneath all the freedoms that would normally make it more difficult to control the individual, such as ease of communication and of movement. But the technology that has made us feel freer has also given the State the wherewithal to keep control over us and to say that it does so for our own good.

This assault on freedom has come from all directions. Surveillance of a sophistication never dreamt of in Orwell’s worst nightmares; the gradual dismantling of the judicial protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases, even to the point of questioning the presumption of innocence; the criminalisation of dozens of activities that would never previously have been considered immoral; the limits on freedom of speech; restrictions on movement and detention without trial or even charge; and the creation of databases containing information on us all and which will track the movements of our children and theirs from cradle to grave.

Taken singly, each one of these might be considered justifiable. For instance, the removal of the double jeopardy rule in trials, whereby a suspect found innocent cannot be tried again for the same offence, may seem sensible given the advances in DNA technology. But when this is combined with proposals to give police greater summary powers or attempts are made to limit, or even to dispense with, trial by jury then the sum of the parts appears far less benign.

Similarly, the proliferation of CCTV cameras would appear to be warranted by the additional reassurance that they provide to people in town centres or in shops, despite the dearth of evidence that they actually prevent crime, as opposed to record it. Yet, if microphones are added to the cameras to eavesdrop on passers-by, and recognition systems are installed to alert watchers to particular types of gait or behaviour, and radio frequency readers are able instantly to identify an individual by way of the personal data contained in a chip on his ID card, do we then feel so sanguine about them?

Government ministers fulminate against charges of illiberalism. Last year, Tony Blair engaged in an illuminating exchange of emails with Henry Porter in The Observer which served to demonstrate that the Prime Minister simply did not understand the concept of individual liberty or, if he did, considered that it should be subordinated to the needs of the many.

This is, of course, a classic socialist concept but not one you expected to hear expressed by Mr Blair, who has tended to regard himself more of an heir to Margaret Thatcher, who cut her ideological teeth on such champions of liberty as Hayek, Berlin and Popper. But in his exchange with Porter, Mr Blair seemed to challenge this post-war, anti-totalitarian philosophical consensus and to do so purely in populist terms.

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