These people will not be deterred by the calamity of last week. They are shameless. In a month or two they will bounce back. The ID card scheme will be relaunched and Jacqui Smith will continue with her plans to demand 53 pieces of information from people before they travel abroad. The Children's Index, the Children's Assessment Framework, the National Health database, the ever-expanding police DNA database will all continue to scoop up information. Why? Because the control of the masses is coded in the deepest part of Labour's being.

So let me just say it now: the politicians we saw ranged before us on the front bench last Tuesday, like defendants in a mass trial, are dangerous, misguided and incompetent; and they are still in a position to cause havoc.

Under a plan known by the reassuringly dull title of Transformational Government, a huge process of centralisation has taken place, creating countless opportunities for security breaches, as well as abuse by the state. At the time, the government defined it as 'transforming public services as citizens receive them and demonstrating how technology can improve the corporate services of government so more resources can be released to deliver "front line" services'.

Anyone emerging from this phrase with a clear meaning in their mind deserves an award, but it has resulted in the demonstration of an almost mathematical truth. The larger the database and the more people who have access to it, the greater the lack of security. Professor Ross Anderson, the leading British expert on this kind of engineering, believes it is impossible to go for scale, security and functionality without one suffering.

The ID card database (cost: from £5.5bn to £13bn) and the NHS Spine (cost from £12bn to £20bn) are the largest now planned. We are assured that both will contain fail-safe security measures, but that is what we believed about the Revenue and Customs database. Helen Wilkinson, who has been leading a campaign against the uploading of information from GPs' records to the national database since she was wrongly identified in NHS records as an alcoholic, has an alarming story from last week. A man went to visit a friend in hospital, couldn't find him and asked someone for help. The hospital worker swiped a card and suddenly a list appeared of every person in every bed in every British hospital. Think journalists, private investigators and those thieves who want to know which homes might be empty.

Some 300,000 people will have access to the NHS database. There are already stories about the records of a well-known patient being viewed for entertainment by 50 hospital staff in the North East. 'Imagine a doctor or professor leaving a laptop on a plane that includes the entire nation's health records,' said Anderson. 'It's not impossible.' Indeed, at the last count there had been 14 lapses in major government IT projects in the last two years.

It's not just about patient privacy or the outrageous decision by Whitehall to override the need to gain people's consent before their records were uploaded; a failure of the internet or large-scale power cuts could leave hospitals without access to x-rays or medical records.

The government won't describe the final form of the National Identity Register, the database that will verify an ID card when it is swiped and record every important transaction in a person's life. However, we know that hundreds of government agencies will have access to it. That means a very large number of people. Abuse of the Police National Computer by officers illegally working for private inquiry agents is not unknown. After the HMRC scandal, is it really such a stretch to imagine them gaining access to the ID database?

Few appreciate that under the EU principle of 'availability'; thousands of foreign law enforcement agencies are allowed access to British databases. Connections are being made all the time. Prepare to welcome the policeman from Palermo into your life.

The centralisation of data in Britain has been accompanied by the language of 'protection' and 'care' and 'modernisation'. The reality may be seen in a scheme called ECCO, which is being tried out in Edinburgh and has caused great resentment among the homeless. ECCO allows any care worker to look at the information given up by people on the street in times of stress. The history of alcoholism, mental disturbance, child abuse and so forth is all retained indefinitely in the name of providing greater care, regardless of an individual's wishes. Privacy is one of the few things the homeless possess.

The most alarming symptoms of the government's information binge have occurred in the children database, now cutely rebranded ContactPoint, which contains details of every child in Britain and the CAF database, which indefinitely holds extensive and very private profiles of children who have needed one or other special educational service. Often these interviews are undertaken without parents' knowledge. There is no end to the government's appetite. In the New Year it is believed the Home Office will seek to make a law by statutory instrument - and therefore unscrutinised by Parliament - that gives police and security services access to details of travel within the UK. All road traffic is being monitored by cameras. Soon it will be every train journey and domestic flight.

It is clear we have a short time to act. A high-profile, independent public inquiry is needed to examine the accumulation of personal data by the government, how it is stored, what it is used for and where the risks to security occur. An important aspect is the technology. Is it desirable for multinationals with no stake in this country's traditions of privacy and freedom to be installing the systems that will control us? I very much doubt we will get such an inquiry because it would strike at the heart of Labour's grasping and incompetent megalomania. But it is worth the opposition pushing for it.

I receive hundreds of emails each week from people asking what they can do. The first is to join a local group set up by No2ID, one of the best run campaigns I have seen. Terri Dowty's Action for Rights on Children (Arch) and Helen Wilkinson's the Big Opt Out both do very good work, as does the Our Kingdom website. We should write to our MPs - especially Labour MPs - and to local newspapers; contribute to blogs and phone-ins. We should talk to our friends and colleagues about what has been done by Labour's centralisers and mainframe men, who Anderson properly identifies as Marxist controllers in another guise.

Each of us should understand that personal information is exactly that - personal - and that the government has only limited rights to demand and retain it. The scale of its operations and the innate weakness of the systems is a very grave concern to us all.

What is needed - and here I hope someone is listening - is a mass movement on the lines of the Countryside Alliance, which goes across all parties and absorbs the skills and expertise of countless activists. Now is the moment to create a movement in defence of our privacy, security and freedom.

henryporter@henry-porter.com