The shocking Guardian report into the surveillance operations run by the police National Public Order Intelligence Unit makes it clear that the right of free protest in Britain now hangs in the balance, and that the very expression of opinion and attendance at meetings is enough for an individual to be categorised as an enemy of society.

Anyone now who feels strongly about climate change or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is now liable to be labelled a "domestic extremist" to be photographed and monitored and to be subject to automatic tracking by the number plate recognition system. There are few stories that capture the parlous state of Britain's democracy like this one, and I suggest none that portray the government's institutionalised contempt for rights and its casual attitude to unfettered growth of police powers.

The outrage that will be expressed in the wake of the investigation by Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, which is to run over the next two days, will mean nothing unless we manage to change attitudes across the board. We now live in a society whose values and instincts have been so skewed by Labour's corrosive rule that it is possible in one week to watch the leader of a fascist organisation promoting his cause on BBC TV – and the next to learn that legitimate protesters with mainstream views are regarded as "domestic extremists" and harried by the police using anti-terror laws when their cars pass through the field of automatic number plate recognition cameras.

We seem to have lost the ability to navigate these issues with anything resembling common sense, which no doubt suits the authorities. They seem to desire more and more control over the individual and the expression of his or her political views.

What is so disturbing is that this blanket surveillance has grown without proper statutory basis, let alone supervision. Laws that were designed for one thing – for instance, preventing terror and harassment – have been deployed by the police, who seem to have forgotten that it is their job to protect freedoms and rights, rather than to act as a force of repression.

The automatic number recognition camera system was built and installed without debate in parliament, without a minute of formal scrutiny and, as many of us predicted, we now find it has become a means of stalking innocent citizens.

But of course innocence is a concept that has been steadily eroded by the authorities in the last decade. It is of vital significance that when Anton Setchell, national co-ordinator of domestic extremism operations for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), was asked for his reaction he said: "Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once."

There you have it: everyone is a potential criminal – or domestic extremist – and so everyone becomes a legitimate target for police surveillance. The remit becomes infinite and with the advances of technology also possible.

Police officers who should be patrolling housing estates and getting to the root of such things as Britain's gang crisis are frivolously deployed making surveillance albums of protesters and stopping old men on their way to express their views at an anti-war demonstration.

This is not just about freedom and free expression, it is also about the lack of leadership in the police. Rather than tackling the tough problems of law and order it seems police would prefer to intimidate and bully those who have a right to express their views, indeed a duty to do so in a properly functioning free society. Well, you can see that it is a lot easier to shove a camera in someone's face at a demonstration, or stop people on anti-terror laws, than to address complex threats to society – but how much damage is being done by this neglect?

This is also a story of function creep and drift. The policy to extend monitoring and surveillance in Britain to this suffocating degree has been developed behind closed doors by two bodies that consistently prove themselves to be the enemy of traditional rights, the Home Office and Acpo. To all intents and purposes both operate secretly. Because Acpo is a limited company it is not even subject to freedom of information requests.

The relationship between the two bodies and the way that policies are decided in committees that mirror each other should become the subject of intense scrutiny by parliament, which has so far shown itself to be utterly powerless in setting parameters for the surveillance of legitimate demonstration and protest.

I'll say it again – unless public opinion moves on issues like this and politicians show some principled leadership, we will lose the qualities that define Britain as one of the world's oldest free societies. It would be a tragedy to allow this to happen simply through inattention.