Where is parliament? When will MPs step up to defend the liberties that are seized from the British public every day in what has now become the most serious attack on constitutional rights that this country has ever suffered?

Last week GCHQ and the Home Office were arguing that £12bn of taxpayers' money should be spent to collect data from every internet connection, phone call and email made in this country. This week we learn that police will be issued with mobile fingerprint scanners to allow offices to carry out identity checks on people in the street.

Neither has been debated in parliament and it seems certain this latest measure – like the creation of the Police National DNA database and the new Automatic Number Plate Recognition system – never will be, even though it must be obvious that the deployment of this device on the streets profoundly affects the rights of citizens to go about their business without being forced to prove who they are and what they are doing.

When ID card legislation was passed, the government assured us that police would not have the right to ask for people's cards on the street precisely because it altered the relationship between the authorities and the citizen. Surely demanding biometrics is going one stage further than asking for a card: it now seems certain that this will form some kind of precedent for doing so.

The police argue that fingerprint data will not be kept. But how are we to know? And anyway that is not the point. In a free society, every individual has the right to move about without being asked to prove him or herself to the state. It is the sine qua non of a functioning democratic society yet we are letting this principle slip without a single voice being raised in parliament. I repeat: where the hell are our elected representatives? Why do they not defend us?

Labour laws are powered by the assumption of people's guilt and their malign intentions towards society. This is the theme which runs right through the government's programme to convert Britain into a state of unwavering watchfulness, in which respect for citizens is replaced by suspicion.

I and several other journalists have been saying this for a long time but it seems without any galvanising effect in the legislature. Lawyers and academics are equally concerned. Last week the outgoing DPP, Sir Ken MacDonald, eloquently voiced his profound worries. But with the exception of Conservative MP David Davis, we have heard little from MPs. Even the Liberal Democrats fail to display the urgent commitment needed to address this national crisis of liberty

As Simon Jenkins remarked in his excellent farewell column from the Sunday Times yesterday, "I have been amazed at the spinelessness of Britain's elected representatives on defending liberty and protesting against state arrogance."

Where this will end I cannot say but I do know that historians of the future will regard the behaviour of parliament as one of the greatest abdications of responsibility that has ever taken place in a democracy. It is as shocking as it is bewildering.