Warhol was a prophet of the surveillance age. In Salford, they now have traffic wardens (called parking attendants in the newspeak of the times ) with cameras fitted to their heads. These sons of Warhol will not just film parking violations but, empowered by one of New Labour's bossy innovations, they will also capture those who litter or allow their dogs to defecate in the wrong place. Armed with the evidence, they will issue fixed penalty notices to offenders.

And a jolly good thing too, you may say. I cannot agree. If some podgy uniformed stalker with a camera lens sticking out of his hat starts filming me any time soon I will not be answerable for my actions, and it is my fervent hope that the people of Salford will treat these street-spies with all the rude contempt they deserve. For it seems to me that the infringement of rights represented by filming without permission far outweighs any crime I or my dog may commit. In short, we are losing more than we gain. And that loss runs right through our once brave, bloody-minded, individualist culture, which is now watched, nagged, chivvied and fussed over by a political establishment whose guiding spirit is Nurse Ratched.

Nurse Mildred Ratched, you will remember, was the head administrative nurse in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the novel by Ken Kesey that is set in a mental health hospital in Oregon. She is a powerful symbol of arbitrary power - and indeed of malign government - who has complete sway over the lives of the inmates, until one Randle McMurphy comes under her charge. She crushes his challenge with a lobotomy but her order in the ward is never quite restored.

With our simple trust that the ever-extending reach of authority is somehow good for us we become more like those inmates every day. Last week saw the launch of the first police camera drone which will spy on people in Manchester. New speed cameras are being tested in London. They don't flash the speeding driver but they do take his picture. Energy monitors are to be installed in our homes to display the individual consumption by appliances, and three million homes already have micro chips in their dustbins which when activated will reveal how much the homeowner is throwing away.

To portray these last two as infringements of liberty would be absurd, but they seem to add to the sense of official intrusion. Of far greater importance is the news that the DNA of 100,000 teenagers - many of them guilty of no crime - has been taken and stored on the police national database. They will be on it for the rest of their lives and have no rights over how their DNA is used and, like the rest of us, cannot predict what genetic science will eventually tell the authorities about them. Can anyone seriously doubt that this is a fundamental breach of privacy and is contrary to the spirit of any code of rights ever written?

What makes our apathy so striking is that even police officers are beginning to speak out about the state we're creating. Ian Readhead, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers data protection group, warned that we were moving to an 'Orwellian situation' with cameras being installed in peaceful villages such as Stockbridge in Hampshire. Mr Readhead, also deputy chief constable of Hampshire, said if the spread of cameras continued, Britain would not be a country he would want to live in.

His comments followed those by the acting chief constable of Suffolk, Colin Langham-Fitt, who criticised the growth of CCTV and the government's ID card scheme. If these officers are expressing concern, we can safely conclude that it is time for us to show something more than the bovine compliance of the last few years.

The issue of surveillance and databases is crucial to our future, to our children's future, and the maintenance of sound and transparent democracy. The more information we allow government about our movements and our lives, the more power we give up to a centralised authority which will, as night follows day, become ever more shielded from proper scrutiny.

With the concerns expressed in this column about the erosion of civil liberties and the attack by Blair on parliamentary scrutiny, I am often taken to task by people who are more relaxed about New Labour's decade-long assault on rights. A woman columnist on the Times suggested that those who worry about surveillance manifest a kind of vanity - that we're suffering from a delusion that the state is actually interested in our petty lives. That is simply not true. I don't believe the state is remotely interested in me, but I am convinced that with its fixations about crime and disorder, the government is building a state that is among the most controlled in the free world. And at least two senior police chiefs agree.

It is a measure of New Labour's cunning to frame the issue in terms of rank individualism against the collective good. This approach is supported by what is known as pro-social thinking, the idea that each of us owes the state and community as much as the state owes us. The effect is to diminish the individual and to burden us with obligations to the state. We must prove our innocence positively, submit to all kinds of monitoring and allow agencies to retain information about our movements and genetic essence all in the endeavour of being good, pro-social citizens.

Ratched is winning. From behind the glass screen I hear the whisper of her uniform, a smile of satisfaction spreads across her face as the inmates begin to settle down for the evening.

But there is still time because most of us know in our hearts that the collective good will suffer just as much as any individual if we continue to lead the way in the West with these surveillance systems. Go to any country on the continent, or to the US, and you will see only a fraction of the cameras that are on British streets, and of course they have nothing like the DNA database or the ID card scheme, which to the French, for example, seems self-evidently oppressive. These societies are no less safe than we are - just less observed and in consequence more free.

Over the last few weeks one or two hints have been dropped by Gordon Brown's allies that he is considering a written constitution, which would include a new, home-grown Bill of Rights. If Labour provides the conditions for the writing of an eloquent but simple Bill of Rights which everyone can understand and which is embedded in the constitution beyond the reach of Parliament, I will eat several straw hats. It seems unlikely because a clearly written statement of each person's rights - including privacy - would militate against the very control that Labour has sought to impose.

But I emphasise one point: Labour could not attempt the Ratched strategy without our help. It is our fears, lack of rigour and laziness which have led us to this pass. Where is Randle McMurphy when we need him?

henry.porter@observer.co.uk