The picture on the front of Labour's manifesto of a young family confronted by the rising sun and the words: "A future fair for all" has been preoccupying me all week. The sickly blend of Stalinist iconography and The Wizard of Oz is weird, but as important is the contrast between the image and what I know Britain to be, which is less free, less equal, less private and less just.

Here is a clutch of stories from last week that remind us of the reality. A Freedom of Information request revealed that in the last six years 15,000 people have been wrongly identified as criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau. Stop and search was up by 182% in 2009, while the use of the Section 44 terror law by officers to stop people without suspicion rose by 66%. In Essex, bouncers, now dignified by the term door supervisors, are being given powers to hand out fixed penalty notices for drunkenness. In Stroud, a man was sentenced to four months in jail for breaching an Asbo that prevents him swearing at his television set. And in Manchester police used a 50,000-volt Taser on a man suffering an epileptic fit.

The sunny uplands of a Labour future do not beckon, at least for me: reading the manifesto closely, I realised there's an ingenious mechanism of self-fulfilment at work which, for example, allows Labour to stoke fear of crime and create thousands of new criminal offences, then employ 17,000 new police officers and 16,000 new community support officers and swell the prison population by 24,000. During the first Labour term, the party relaxed drinking laws and planning requirements for licensed premises. Now, it deplores drunken antisocial behaviour. It sold hundreds of playing fields for development; now, it demands that we find more for teenagers to do.

In this barely plausible document, which makes the astonishing boast: "We are proud of our record on civil liberties", there is nothing to remind us of the intrusions of state databases, the mass surveillance planned for our email, phone calls and internet usage, the new measures to allow secret interception of mail by the taxman, the attack on jury trial, the half-million people who came under some sort official surveillance last year, Britain's alleged involvement in torture and rendition…

On and on the list goes, but I won't try your patience; I will just tell you that I finally flung "A future fair for all" across the room when I came to the section called "Democratic Reform" and the sentence: "A new politics also means strengthening the power of Parliament to hold the executive to account." This piety was too much to endure from a government that cut short debate in Parliament by unprecedented use of the guillotine, drafted legislation so that toxic measures at the end of bills weren't examined and used record levels of unscrutinised secondary legislation. The only reason Labour agreed to reforms that will give backbenchers more say and the chairs of select committees more independence was because Harriet Harman was ambushed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, as well as her own backbenchers. A few weeks later, her party makes a virtue of something they were forced to accept and which they had resisted for 13 years.

When people use extreme language about politicians I mistrust them, so I will simply confine myself here to saying that Labour is not fit to be in charge of a free society.

The impact of the last 13 years can be seen in the policies of both main opposition parties but particularly the Conservatives who have been bamboozled by sentiments such as this in Labour's manifesto: "The Tories talk tough but vote soft on issues from gun crime to DNA."

With the help of Rupert Murdoch, Labour has permanently changed the co-ordinates of the middle ground. On crime, the Conservatives cannot risk the big girl's blouse taunt and while the menace of an intrusive, bossy government may fit the party's criticism of the big state, the manifesto confines itself to just one-and-a-half pages about restoring civil liberties. Yes, it is encouraging that the Tories accept "Labour has subjected Britain's historic freedoms to unprecedented attack", and are committed to scrapping the ID card, yet there's no mention of a great repeal bill to redress Labour's attack on liberty, which was being pushed by Dominic Grieve, and no undertaking to hold a judicial inquiry on accusations of British involvement in torture..

Writing in the Observer, David Cameron commits the party to openness in government and to some disclosure of personal data, which is welcome, but he does not go the whole way to make all personal information held by the state available to the individual, who should also know who is using his or her information and what for. That would represent a real transfer of power from state to individuals and society.

As you would expect, the Liberal Democrats are much better on civil liberties. Their manifesto guarantees a freedom bill, trial by jury, the reform of the regulation of investigatory powers laws and protections for free speech and protest. They promise to scrap ID cards, the children's database and fingerprinting in schools, put a stop to the creation of new offences and remove innocent people from the DNA database.

It's good that both opposition parties recognise the problem, if only fleetingly in the case of the Tories. I am beginning to wonder if any politician appreciates quite how much Labour's laws and its corrosively pessimistic view of society have permeated national life or, for that matter, the way that a culture of fear, encouraged by government and the popular press, leads to ludicrous overreaction on the ground. There is something freakish about a man being stopped from taking photographs of his own toddler in a shopping mall or police using terror laws to search an artist doing a watercolour in London.

Since reading the following sentence a few years ago in John Skorupski's study of John Stuart Mill I have been haunted by it. I quote it again because it seems so absolutely right for the moment. "It could be," he writes, "that modern democracy chronically risks falling into a cycle of periods of cultural stagnation interrupted by brief phases of undiscriminating assault on its vital traditions and institutions: dominated in both phases by the intellectually second-rate but socially and politically effective."

There seems no doubt that we have passed through just such a period of assault and that last phrase certainly describes New Labour but there is a real obligation on us to guard against stagnation and the lazy addiction to fear.