To place his chief rival for the premiership in the Home Office, that graveyard of political careers, which has seen the unhappy departure from government of four out of five Labour home secretaries must have given Gordon Brown a rare moment of saturnine pleasure during the reshuffle.

But Alan Johnson will have more clout in the job than Jacqui Smith, and if Johnson is as resilient as his admirers claim, he will be able to use his short time at the Home Office to prove that he can lead the party. So it is all to play for, but Johnson has to move quickly in several key areas.

On Monday he should announce a review of the government's ID cards policy, an increasingly unpopular measure which is going to cost the taxpayer a minimum of £4.5bn and probably cause every adult in the country irritation and substantial expense, and yet will produce none of the significant gains in security the government has claimed for the scheme.

Stepping back from ID cards will check the advances the opposition have made in this area, as well as signal a change of tone in Labour thinking; moving away from New Labour's emphasis on increasing the authority of the state, against the power and self determination of the individual.

Johnson should make a speech that underlines that crime has gone down overall and – apart from a recent slight rise due to the recession – remains on a downward path. He can, without doubt, claim this as a Labour triumph, just as one former home secretary did to me the other day. This would rebalance the Home Office's thinking and would reduce the inflammatory power of the tabloid press. Labour's strategy has been to use newspapers' obsession with crime and disorder for its own ends, resulting in the 3,500 new criminal offences and the 30% rise in the prison population. Johnson's speech must tread a delicate path, for it must educate a public – which is more fearful of crime than at any time in the last 50 years – about the actual threats in our society, not the ones they read about in the Sun.

Johnson must declare that the police will not, under his stewardship at the Home Office, seek to retain DNA samples from innocent people, a practice that has been ruled illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. He should assure us that police will end the practice of targeting young individuals who have done nothing wrong, but who have been fingered by their intelligence as likely criminals. This is wrong.

Relations between the police and the public have deteriorated dramatically under Labour. As a former union leader, Johnson should assert the British people's right to assemble and protest without being photographed or harassed by aggressive police officers. There should be a review of the stop and search quotas being enforced by most urban police forces under terror laws. Guidance is also needed on the use of section 27 of the Violent Crimes Reduction Act. This clause has been abused by regional police forces who have used it to stop football supporters attending games. In the wake of recent shooting by police, Johnson should issue new regulations on the use of firearms by police and curb the deployment of Taser stun guns, recently questioned by a Scottish chief constable.

The Home Office's suspicion of the public has in many ways come to represent the authoritarian state. Each of the last five home secretaries has attempted to demonstrate strong, decisive leadership by moving up a couple of teeth on the ratchet. Producing tougher laws does not make for safer or more content society; in fact it does the opposite. In his brief time, Johnson could interrupt the feed, back loop, and perhaps start a public discussion about the causes of crime. It would take great courage, but we really do need a debate on the decriminalisation of drugs and the effect that this would have on society, crime figures and international crime syndicates.

Finally, he needs to address the problem of state surveillance. Britain has become a world leader in the collection of personal data as well as a leader in security lapses. Mass surveillance is undesirable in a free society because it places the average citizen at a disadvantage in relation to the state and creates an atmosphere of suspicion, which undermines the idea that civil servants are our servants. The state does not need to collect 53 pieces of information from everyone who leaves or enters the country. The state does not need access to the data from our all emails, internet connections, phone calls and text messages, certainly not a vast cost of £1.2bn-£1.5bn. This scheme will not stop terrorism but it will give the state unprecedented powers to monitor such people as legitimate climate change protesters. Mass interception of data is wrong and against the spirit of Britain's unwritten constitution There is much to do, but if Johnson is half the man his fans make him out to be, he could prove himself in this job and redeem so much that has gone wrong under successive Labour home secretaries. The first job is to persuade the Home Office that it is working for the British people, not against them.