The blades of the helicopter beat as it hovers over a city of computer components. A police siren sounds, changing pitch as it speeds to some crime scene. We hear a big dog barking. Then comes the authorities' message: “Your town, your street, your home. It's all in our database.” The official voice is calm and patronising: “It's impossible to hide,” we are reminded. There is a knock on the door. Our palms sweat. Everything fades to black.

No, I'm not in some nightmare from the days of Cold War Russia. Nor on the wrong side of the law in communist China. I'm here and now, in the UK, watching the latest advertisement from the BBC as it tries to make us pay our licence fee. But however fine and well-spoken the words, this Orwellian campaign - with its menacing soundtrack of licence-dodgers being rounded up by airborne police dog-handlers - is complete thuggery. (The effete BBC doesn't of course wield the cosh itself. It contracts such persuasion to TV Licensing, a consortium of Capita and other private businesses.)

In just 40 seconds, this sinister advertisement shows how far we have become the slaves of the database state, rather than its masters. You thought we lived in a free society? In a free society, no government could tell its citizens, with such quiet condescension and with no hint of embarrassment: “We are spying on you. We know all about you. Just watch your step.”

Nor are these Gestapo tactics new. Years ago, similar advertisements showed a family laughing at some comedy programme on TV. Comes the voice-over: “If you have a TV licence, you're laughing.” In the dimly-lit street, a van draws up. Black leather boots crunch up the path, the family still oblivious. The voice continues: “If not...” A gloved hand presses the bell. Suddenly, the family stops laughing, their faces gripped by sheer dread.

It's time we citizens stood up against this state-sponsored intimidation, particularly now that anti-terror legislation is being used to spy on whether our dogs are fouling the pavement and that we're closing our wheelie-bin properly. And it's time we told our unelected officials that we don't much like “our town, our street, our home” being in their database - given their ability to lose it in the mail or leave it on laptops that they forget in the pub.

I'd like to see the people who design these malevolent adverts - and the BBC executives who approved them - hauled up before a House of Commons committee to be told that citizens, not they, are the real bosses. And I'd like to see the BBC funded by some mechanism - like taking adverts that don't actually terrorise the general public.

Dr Eamonn Butler is Director of the Adam Smith Institute

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