[efoods]Returning to Britain from a summer holiday abroad, you begin to notice things that perhaps escaped your attention before – the huge number of CCTV cameras that infest our public spaces and, much less obviously, the atmosphere of watchfulness and control that has now become a way of life.

This is the regime that 12 years of New Labour have imposed on Britain, a place of unwavering suspicion, paranoia – and obsessive surveillance.

We have become the sort of society that we would unhesitatingly have railed against a few years ago. But, because the change has been brought about with such stealth, we are the very last to see it.