Civil liberties have few friends in government – only in opposition. Witness the coalition’s decision to hand police and intelligence agencies far-reaching new powers to monitor emails, phone calls and websites. ‘Big Brother WILL be watching you,’ booms today’s Independent.

It all started so promisingly, too. Page 11 of the coalition agreement, struck in May 2010, stated: ‘The government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedom and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.’

A just verdict on New Labour? Absolutely. Guilty as charged, m’lud. A progress report one year later, by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, showed that real progress was made in the early months of the new administration. ID cards were scrapped; steps were taken to remove the profiles of one million innocent people held on the national DNA database; the ContactPoint database of children’s details was dumped; and the criminal record check regime reformed.

The same coalition agreement also promised: ‘We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason.’

So what has changed? The technology has advanced apace, granted, but so far as to justify Britain adopting the same kind of surveillance as China and Iran?

The reforms are promoted as combating terrorism. And there are still Islamist extremists out there in the ether, pledging eternal jihad. But in July it will be seven years since 7/7. The available evidence suggests the security services have done an excellent job in rooting out potential terrorists since then. It would be foolhardy to argue that the threat has been extinguished (and no journalist would offer such a hostage to fortune), but where is the evidence that the preventive powers already available are inadequate? Where – to quote the coalition document – are ‘good reasons’?

It is an iron law of public life, of course, that the police and intelligence officers are programmed to seek whatever permissions they can from suggestible politicians (who rapidly become ‘house-trained’). It’s in their DNA, if you’ll pardon the irony.

What ministers have failed to do over many years is to achieve the requisite balance between freedom and national security that is the hallmark of a properly functioning democracy. What’s in progress here is a terrifying continuum of ever-increasing state encroachment, the logical culmination of which is a security camera in every house. After all, if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.

So far today, opposition to the proposals in parliament has been led by thwarted would-be Tory leader David Davis – presumably because Labour is so hopelessly compromised on the issue. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, in whose own DNA one might expect to find ‘civil liberties’ encoded, are apparently meekly accepting of the plans. Who else is there: George Galloway?

Some things are more important than petrol and pasties. Some democracy. Some liberty.