Some sixty years ago Eric Arthur Blair wrote a book under his pen name of George Orwell. In it he described how an all-knowing government cynically combined pervasive and constant surveillance of its citizens with insidious and blatant propaganda to enable it to maintain an often brutal control.

 The book was entitled 1984.

However Orwell never suspected that England would ever become the country he was describing. So, were he to be alive today, it would have been illuminating to learn his reaction upon seeing the front page of The Sunday Times. “Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones”, the paper claimed.

“Everyone who buys a mobile telephone,” The Sunday Times stated, “will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase.”

The compulsory national register for the owners of all 72 million mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime, the paper claimed.

In another story by the same reporter, David Leppard, in the same issue, he noted that “phones can be located to within a few yards using cell site analysis, which tracks mobile phone users as they move from one signalling area to the next.”

In essence, in introducing the database, the government will succeed in “electronically tagging” every mobile phone user in the country.

Leppard then went on to consider the implications were the system to be simultaneously linked to some of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain. Through doing so the state would then not only know your precise location, but could also watch where you were going or what you were doing.

Last year, in 2007, the police and other public bodies made no fewer than 519,260 requests for personal communications data such as phone and email records. Unfortunately Leppard did not give the reasons for those requests. But it is perfectly possible that not all were connected to terrorism. However, were the national mobile phone database to exist, there would almost certainly be a dramatic increase in this number.

Inevitably the argument that will be used by the government to justify its insidious erosion of our civil liberties is that we have to be protected from crime and terrorism.

The same argument has been used to try to persuade us of the need for identity cards. Yet the fact that Spain has identity cards did nothing to stop the Madrid bombings. Similarly nobody has been able to demonstrate that identity cards would have been able to prevent the London bombings. But what is certain is that, even were there to be a national mobile phone database, criminals and terrorists would simply circumvent it by using either stolen or cloned phones.

No doubt we will next be told that we will have to show our passports or identity cards before we can buy weedkiller or any other product or substance that might conceivably be used for any terrorist or criminal activity.

A further concern is the fact that the government has shown, on more than the one occasion, that it is perfectly prepared to use legislation for purposes other than those originally intended.

Most recently, anti-terrorism legislation was employed to confiscate assets in the British branches of Icelandic banks. Similarly Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows the police to stop and search anyone in a specific area, has been used against largely law abiding anti-war, anti-weapons and anti-capitalist protestors.

Even more appalling has been the case of Maya Evans and Milan Rai. On October 25 2005, both were arrested in front of the Cenotaph on Whitehall. Their “crime” was to read out in public the names of those servicemen and Iraqi civilians who, up to that point, had been killed since the invasion of Iraq. They were charged, convicted and fined under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005: Maya for “participating in an unauthorised demonstration”, and Milan for “organising an unauthorised demonstration”.

Subsequently the pair were again arrested, convicted and fined in May 2007 for organising and participating in another peaceful yet “unauthorised” demonstration within 1km of Parliament. After refusing to pay both fines totalling £600 Milan was sentenced to 14 days imprisonment.

Then, on November 2^nd, The Sunday Times published a letter from Jacqui Smith that said: “Your story Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones (News October 19) is both factually incorrect and misleading. For the record, we have not even considered this as a policy option, much less decided it should be the policy.”

As a result I decided not to post this blog. However yesterday, on January 1^st, the lead story on the front page of The Guardian read: “The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.”

For the database to be effective, the government will need to know the identity of mobile phone users. And without establishing identity at the point of purchase it is difficult to conceive how this might be possible. No doubt some spin doctor from the Ministry of Truth will be able to provide the answer.

When The Police originally sang “Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break, every step you take/ I'll be watching you” they never had the government in mind. Were the Home Secretary Jackie Smith to be the singer, the lyrics would take on a different resonance.

The government’s proposals, in particular the creation of the communications database, in effect reverses the profoundly important presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. Instead, every citizen is to be considered guilty until such time as they can be eliminated from enquiries.

The Home Office say they will be consulting on their proposals early in the New Year. Before then, should you disagree with the idea of a mobile phone database that effectively allows the state to stalk its citizens with impunity, write to your MP and say so. His or her name and contact details can be found here. If you want your voice to be heard without officialdom listening in, now is the time to speak.