Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary? This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power. She wants to record at her Cheltenham communications headquarters every mobile phone call, text and internet message of every Briton living. This is close to madness.

Home secretaries always speak with forked tongues. Like Augustine they cry, “God make me liberal, but not yet, not while someone is watching.” They explain their latest click of the authoritarian ratchet by wailing, “You can’t imagine the pressure we were under.” On leaving office they tend to patronise some civil rights charity, as if in penance.

This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the European league for surveillance and civil intrusion, a miserable state of affairs for the home of Magna Carta.

Smith’s GCHQ “interception modernisation programme”, reportedly at a staggering £12 billion, will run alongside the ID card register, the driving licence centre, the numberplate recognition computer and the CCTV network in a “pentagon” of control. Its data bank will one day and for sure fuse with banking and employment records and that stumbling giant, the National Health Service personal records computer, each polluting the other with crashing terminals, uncorrectable inaccuracies and false trails.

We know from Russian hacking services that such information will be freely available because it cannot be kept secret from intruders, thieves or the laptops of careless officials. That is why the pages of Computer Weekly are crammed with snake-oil salesmen claiming “total security” packages. I remember a shack in a Bangalore suburb offering to “break all computer encryptions known to man”.

The spider at the centre of this web of control, GCHQ’s Iain Lobban, appears to have so mesmerised Smith that officials at the Home Office last week leaked a warning that his demands were “impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful”. Smith was unmoved. Like every home secretary, she wants, at the flick of a switch, to know who is doing what, when and where anywhere in Britain and in real time. This is truly Big Brother stuff.

Since 9/11 there has sprung into being a war-on-terror version of the “military-industrial complex”, against which Eisenhower warned Americans as the cold war developed in the 1950s. The complex roams seminars and think tanks with blood-curdling accounts of what Osama Bin Laden is planning. Visitors need go no further than the biennial defence sales exhibition in London’s Docklands to see Eisenhower’s monsters on parade. They feed on the politics of fear, a leitmotif of this government. The entire nation is regarded as under suspicion.

Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the US justice, more relevant: free men are naturally alert to the wiles of evil-minded rulers but “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding”.

Last week GCHQ lobbyists took to the press declaring that any opposition to Smith’s surveillance plan would be “disastrous” for national security. They even wheeled out the familiar back-up argument for those who might regard £12 billion as a ludicrous overreaction to terrorism alone. Without the 500,000 intercepts placed on mobile phone calls each year, The Times reported, “we could not begin to solve any kidnap whatever”. Likewise the proponents of ID cards call them “vital” for public services and those of the NHS computer “a life saver” for accident victims. They are nothing of the sort.

A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last week promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of electronic communication, not contents. This is incredible. It reminds me of the old Home Office lie that all phone taps “require the home secretary’s personal authority”. Smith’s apparatchiks want to read the lot.

A similar line was spun last year by James Hall, the head of Home Office “identity and passport services”, in claiming that identity details would be safeguarded and not sent abroad. At the last Lisbon conference, European Union members agreed to “cross-border interoperability . . . highlighted in electronic identity and e-procurement”, with Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, in active participation. Hall must have known this.

ID cards were defended by David Blunkett, a former home secretary, as to “protect identity”. He knew they would be churned out from a Bombay back street at £5 a time. The government does not know the meaning of the term “safeguard”. A year ago all 25m recipients of child benefit were told their personal details, addresses and bank accounts had been handed to contractors and lost.

Each new repressive law is abused, sometimes blatantly. This month Gordon Brown used the 2005 antiterror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, an outrage that passed without protest from parliament or the courts. The same law has been used by local authorities to monitor school catchment areas and rubbish disposal. When ministers take untrammelled power, they lie.

Government computers are protected by safety measures costing the taxpayer millions. Yet this summer almost 2m personal details from the defence ministry were dispersed by EDS, the American firm.

The employment records of the constitutional affairs department, including of the lord chancellor, were also lost. Revenue & Customs treats every Briton’s tax details as vulnerable to freedom of information. As for bank accounts, a newspaper found them available from a Russian website at $75 a batch.

Smith parrots the totalitarian’s answer that “the innocent have nothing to fear”. But they do. They know from experience that government cannot be trusted with private information. In addition, any errors in that information are almost impossible to correct. Ask anyone whose credit rating has been falsely challenged by a bank computer.

This month some worms started to turn. The Lords rejected Smith’s demand to be allowed to detain suspects for 42 days without charge. A galaxy of former judges, law officers and ministers opposed her. In response to the proposed expansion of surveillance, Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, accused Smith of going down a path “in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state”. Even the Association of Chief Police Officers warned that collecting so much data was “a real threat to the individual”.

The war on terror has been a wretched blind alley in British political history. It has revealed all that is worst in British government – its authoritarianism, its sloppiness and its unaccountability. Yet restoring the status quo ante will be phenomenally hard.

In all my years of writing this column, from which I am standing down, I have been amazed at the spinelessness of Britain’s elected representatives in defending liberty and protesting against state arrogance. They appear as parties to the conspiracy of power. There have been outspoken judges, outspoken peers, even outspoken journalists. There have been few outspoken MPs. Those supposedly defending freedom are whipped into obedience. I find this ominous.

Next month Simon Jenkins takes up the chairmanship of the National Trust

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