A week or two away from the land of surveillance and you realise what a very strange place Britain has become. On my return from holiday I understood one frightening truth, which is that surveillance systems and databases have become as much a part of the country's infrastructure as the road or rail networks. No government, however liberal or determined, has the power to dismantle the apparatus that Labour has put in place.

On the thread of my most recent post, divesandlazarus asked, "I wonder if in 2010 Cameron will be able to 'press default' and return the criminal justice system legislation to what it was in 1997." The answer of course is that he won't be able to, even if he wanted to, and the same issue applies to the databases that form Labour's dreadful legacy.

There is no return from this point. All we can hope to do is find politicians at the next election who have a real understanding of the pace of technology and its implications for privacy, and they begin to find means of controlling data gathering and surveillance. This requires effort in the political classes as well as among voters. I see no evidence of that.

During the last dozen years we have constantly been assured that govnernment databases are there to help us and that they will be tightly controlled to guarantee individual liberty. A key part of this promise is the guarantee that systems will not link up to share information. That is baloney. The whole point of the project to create a super structure that will know everything about us and will make each one of us dependent on the database.

Already the Home Office is devising ways of making use of the ID card integral to gaining employment, an extremely sinister development.

Last week, The Register published an important story, through a freedom of information request, they discovered that the Criminal Records Bureau is considering requiring ID card and fingerprint data in an attempt to improve the accuracy of CRB checks. This would force people to get ID cards in order to get a job. As Phil Both of No2ID says, "This is entirely consistent with the various forms of coercion strategy they've been working on to create artificial 'volunteers' for ID cards."

You have to acknowledge the cunning of the Home Office and CRB. As the Register reports the CRB is palpably dysfunctional. "In the 12 months to the end of March 2009, identity errors at the CRB more than doubled compared to the previous year. More than half of the 1,570 mistakes were made in just one month." The government's solution to this disaster, which by the way has not received nearly enough publicity, is to marry the CRB with the ID card, which the Home Office desperately wants to make compulsory. From this autumn, about 11.3m people will be required to get enhanced background checks and join a register if they are to continue working with children.

The CRB, which is at the centre of the checking procedure, is obviously going to come under a great deal of pressure so the government's answer is to add another layer of compulsion and expense.

Clearly the ID card holds very little appeal to the general public. In Manchester, the designated test bed for the government's megalomaniac plans, just 8,000 people have inquired about applying for a card. Even Lord Brett, the minister in charge of the introduction of the ID card scheme, admitted this was a very small percentage of the population. The Manchester Evening News reported that a website poll indicated that 81% of adults would not be taking part. Not much of a result for the £140m spent by the Home Office on consultants last year, a 44% rise on the previous year, much of which is due to the ID card.

The point in this case study is that once a database is established for a discrete purpose, the authorities always find a means of extending its application. It is a fundamental law of databases that they spread outwards to connect and share information. What the Home Office and CRB want is to make people's livelihoods dependent on these system, even though they fraught with obvious problems of security and accuracy. Phil Booth said "If the CRB gets its way, then for millions of people their ID card would be directly linked to a detailed police record and a scoring system designed to evaluate their suitability for various jobs." That is truly appalling prospect.