Throughout the 12 years since New Labour began its assault upon our civil liberties, the response to those of us who publicly vented our dismay was straightforward: 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'

So, by that logic, we were invited to embrace the ugly stacks of CCTV cameras that crawled across our High Streets and which, surprise, surprise, did nothing to reduce general levels of crime and lawlessness.

By the same token, we were encouraged to say 'Amen' to the multi-billion-pound ID cards scheme, or 'entitlement cards' as Tony Blair's old flatmate Lord Falconer used soothingly to call them when he was a minister in the Home Office.

This gigantic New Labour bung to foreign-owned IT companies is now discredited, though still being 'rolled out' as a voluntary scheme in Manchester to save the Government's face.

Arrested

But the most grotesque and brazen undermining of our freedoms, we now know, is the theft of our very essence. This week we have learned that police are routinely arresting innocent people specifically to secure their DNA samples.

Britain now boasts the largest DNA database in the world, with samples logged from 5.6 million people, of whom almost a million are known to be entirely innocent of any offence.

The authorities who monitor the database are fully aware of these people's innocence, yet they resist at every turn any attempt to have those samples erased.

And those innocent people who, once arrested and released with no legal stain on their character, might reasonably want to have their DNA wiped off the database are required to pay £200 and wait for months and months for the police to do so.

'It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so,' a retired superintendent told the Human Genetics Commission.

'It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained.'

It is said, though the figures are disputed, that up to three- quarters of black men aged 18 to 35 are recorded on the DNA database.

How odd that this blatantly discriminatory statistic does not appear to trigger any sort of challenge under that other great New Labour achievement, the Human Rights Act, which is supposed to guarantee our rights to privacy, private life and equality under the law.

The evidence is now clear: step by step, sample by sample, the DNA database is expanding into a national register not just of criminals but of each and every one of us.

Let us be clear here. It is perfectly possible to construct a reasonably plausible argument that all of us, at birth, should have our DNA recorded and applied to a gigantic national database which, besides assisting in crime detection, would perform all manner of ingenious medical profiling.

There is a case that such a database might help in research into diabetes, dementia and various genetic conditions.

It is conceivable that the public would go along with this scheme. Large parts of the electorate might still trust the Government not to abuse the information it holds about us on trust. Many misguided people still believe in the essential goodness of the State.

Yet my guess is that if the question were ever directly put to the voter, British cussedness would scupper the idea. I suspect that the majority of voters would bridle at handing over their most intimate information to a government that has proved itself incapable of either holding on to it securely or using it within strict limitations.

New Labour knows this culture of mistrust. This is why people such as Lord Falconer, Jack Straw, Patricia Hewitt and others with impeccable, self- declared attachment to abstract notions of rights and privacy, have gone along in a covert scheme to nationalise our identities by stealth, on a scale that would make the Stasi green with envy.

A British government can no longer presume to run the steel or car industry as it did a generation ago, so instead New Labour has nationalised the individual, without once consulting us directly on the matter.

The deliberate policy to create a comprehensive national DNA database is one of those public policy matters which, like the introduction of ID cards and the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, is deemed too important to be opened up to any sort of democratic scrutiny. It is policy-by-creep.

Indeed, the real scandal is that the exact implementation of the database has been passed down to unelected police commissioners who make up policy on the hoof about whose DNA should be retained and then whose should be erased.

Consent

It is not unreasonable for police officers to want to create a 'belt and braces' approach to catching future or potential criminals; but it is up to politicians to rein them in when our collective liberties are being encroached. Instead, New Labour has tacitly encouraged them all the way.

Nor are such issues confined to the DNA database alone. This week I received a letter from our daughter's primary school inviting us to give consent to an undisclosed 'team of health professionals' to supervise her medical well-being henceforth.

The letter from our North London council asserts that it is 'important that the school holds a complete health record for your child'. Why? Is that not what we and our GP are supposed to do?

The letter adds, with a comical lack of confidence in its own competence, that: 'We aim to keep personal information confidential.'

My wife worries that our four-year-old daughter will feel left out if she cannot join group discussions with health professionals about her medical and psychological anxieties, but I'm afraid I have put my foot down and counted her out.

Undeclared

Leaving aside my visceral dislike of Ed Balls, I cannot see why I should agree that our daughter's medical records should be passed on to various undeclared parties including 'other agencies such as the Children, Schools and Families Department', any more than I would wish her DNA to be placed on the national database.

Indeed, I found myself wondering whether the two areas might be connected in some way.

The problem for those of us who worry even slightly about our privacy is that the horse has already bolted. We now know that a government which introduced the Data Protection Act allows the DVLA in Swansea routinely to sell car registration details to cowboy car park clampers charging £150 to release vehicles.

We know that the Inland Revenue 'lost' the banking and personal details of everyone who claims child benefit; we know, too, that a CD with the DNA details of 4,000 murderers and rapists on the run was lost after being left lying around in an office for 12 months by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Even if we believed in a beneficial purpose for the DNA database, why should we trust this Government to keep our most sacred details secret when it shows in its behaviour a blithe lack of concern about our privacy?

It is high time that those of us who are sceptical about big government find our voice in speaking up for traditional English liberty.

We need to say that just because we have nothing to hide, we don't need to explain why we have nothing to fear from an ever- expanding, ever more intrusive state.

Let us turn the argument around and ask the State: what do you have to fear from us?