Today 246 years ago – 23 April, 1773 – John Wilkes published the North Briton No 45, the final issue of his polemical magazine, which attacked the king and ministers for their corruption and abuse of power. It is a famous moment in the history of English liberty forced by Wilkes's exuberant daring and disdain for the authorities, which replied with an arrest warrant for anyone connected with the publication of No 45.

I thought of Wilkes yesterday during the conference on a new bill of rights staged by the joint committee on human rights in Westminster, and wondered what his high-spirited ghost would have made of it all.

Bizarre is the word that strikes me: a room full of about 40 decent, experienced, intelligent people – academics, lawyers, campaigners and politicians – treating each other with the utmost courtesy while they traded points about a new bill of rights and responsibilities. It could not have been more removed from the reality of Britain today or the attack on rights and liberties that our society has suffered under this morally and financially bankrupt regime.

Don't take my word for it – look at today's newspapers. Once you've waded through the appalling news about Britain's public finances there's plenty of evidence of something seriously wrong at the heart of the body politic.

Lets start with Ed Balls, minister for children and self-promotion, intimate of Damian McBride, who is accused of misleading parliament by the hapless former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Ken Boston.

It is all a bit dry and technical but what we should take away from Boston's evidence to the children, schools and families select committee yesterday is that Balls dumped on Boston in an inquiry in which he prohibited Lord Sutherland to investigate the government's responsibility in the Sats test fiasco. He is able to do this because of the Inquiries Act 2005, which was brought in by Labour to make ministers more powerful and government less accountable. Balls, not a man of conscience it seems, had no hesitation in "sexing up" the evidence against Boston.

Turn the page and you find another minister exposed for deceit. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, apparently misled high court judges by claiming that the US would stop sharing intelligence with Britain if documents were disclosed showing MI5's complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. Lawyers acting for Mohamed claim the Foreign Office made "false assertions" – ie lied – when it said it had contacted President Barack Obama's office and was told that America would cease co-operation. The court has also heard MI5 apologise for misleading statements – ie lies – which disguised the amount they knew about Mohamed's "secret interrogation" – ie torture – in Morocco.

The same news story delivers the unbelievable information that 17 MI5 and MI6 officers are to be accused of involvement in the extraordinary rendition and torture of seven British citizens and residents. Of course the officers are innocent until proven guilty so we must make no assumptions about these cases but it is shocking even to read this about officials of the modern British state, which so many were willing to trust with 42-day detention without charge.

You begin to wonder whether people in authority have lost the ability to tell right from wrong, or simply go on saying things when they know they are wrong, which in a way is worse. Yesterday we had Sir Paul Stephenson, the new commissioner of the Met, insisting that his force had mounted an astonishing operation during the G20 summit. He also praised the violent Territorial Support Group, one of whose members attacked Ian Tomlinson moments before he died. Maybe this was for the consumption of his officers, who have suffered severe criticism for a number of incidents over the last few weeks, but leadership of the Met must include a willingness to address problems rather than reassurance for the force that all is well when palpably it is not.

Then we have the 12 students who were arrested after Bob Quick flourished his briefing documents outside No 10. All have been released but 11 are to be deported on national security grounds, which one suspects is a result of police embarrassment rather than any immediate threat to national security. You can bet that after all the fuss with Quick, the police would have pressed charges on the slightest pretext.

The affair is to be investigated by Lord Carlile, the former Liberal Democrat MP and now the government's independent reviewer of terrorism. The words liberal and democrat are surprising elements in that sentence, however the only word I would seriously question is independent because Carlile has steadfastly supported the government's authoritarian measures, even coming out for the 42-day detention initiative, which in the circumstances seems hardly to qualify him to investigate the complicated issues that surround the arrest of these 12 young men. We must wonder whether he will produce a full and frank account or whether this will be the sort of inquiry that Balls favours and Labour legislation enables, one that finds for the state and its agencies as a matter of course.

These stories are in many respects more depressing than reading the economic news because they all seem to tell of the slow deterioration of standards and leadership in British public life. I think it is possible to argue that this decline is also responsible for the attack on liberty and rights, which is what makes the whole debate surrounding a possible new bill of rights and responsibilities so interesting.

Are we to allow a government that performs so few functions scrupulously and efficiently to start defining our responsibilities to each other and the state, especially as so many responsibilities are – as Afua Hirsch pointed out yesterday – inherent in the Human Rights Act?

A glance at one day's newspapers is enough to tell us that the only responsibilities that need defining – and with ever more vigour – are of those of government, a point made at the JCHR conference by Professor Keith Ewing, who publishes a much awaited book called The Bonfire of the Liberties later this year.

Wilkes would recognise what is going on in our society. Essentially the struggle that he engaged in nearly 250 years ago is no different to the one that we face now. It is to control the state and make it act with respect towards the individual.

He wrote in No 45: