Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed that storing details of individuals’ communications was vital to prevent further terrorist atrocities.

Activities which will be subject to snooping for the first time include visits to social networking sites such as Facebook, auction sites such as eBay, gaming websites and chatrooms. The billions of pieces of data are likely to be stored for a year or more. The cost is estimated to be at least £1billion, and could be far higher.

Last night MPs and privacy groups attacked the proposals as 'Stalinist', 'Orwellian' and a reversal of the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Officials are split between placing the vast amount of data to be collected on a huge central Government database or forcing service providers to store the information, to be accessed on demand.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: ‘These proposals would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain personal information on individuals. 'Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and running databases there needs to be a full and proper debate.

Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said: ‘This is the Stalinist vision which we always knew was on the agenda. Monitoring the entire population is a complete abhorrence, reversing the presumption of innocent until proven guilty and making us all suspects.’

This will soon be a country more spied upon than Communist East Germany under the Stasi

However, since 1997 New Labour has progressively undermined this assumption.

We have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. Our DNA database, which comprises four million people, many of whom have committed no crime at all, is also bigger than that of any other country. Identity cards are in the pipeline. The Government is considering creating one vast database which will contain details of every single e-mail and telephone call, mobile or otherwise, made in the United Kingdom.

Every call you make, every visit to an internet site, every e-mail you send - all will be logged and stored in some vast Government computer, if Ms Smith has her way. If this had been proposed ten years ago, no one would have believed it. Even now, after ten years of creeping surveillance by an authoritarian Government, it seems incredible.

Labour was also a party of liberty and freedom. For many years, while in opposition, Labour voted against the Prevention of Terrorism Act in Northern Ireland. It is now the party of state control, and its traditional love of freedom is restricted to a few maverick backbenchers whose views are ignored by the hierarchy.

Maybe the party's Stalinist leanings were always stronger than we thought. Maybe it has succumbed to the nexus of spooks and security freaks that lurks at the heart of Whitehall.