Brian Monteith: Coalition is caught in a web of broken promises

Meanwhile, changes to benefits will have their own effect in Scotland and the Barnett consequentials of the spending cuts will now kick-in, forcing the SNP government's Finance Secretary, John Swinney, to make savings that he should have been big enough to make already.

These decisions will impact on real people causing great distress and I shall not dwell on whether or not we should blame the politicians who got us in such a mess or the ones who are making a fist of trying to resolve it no matter how badly.

But in these stressful times it is easy to pass over other decisions that our government and its agencies are making that seem less important compared to those decisions that prevent citizens meeting their weekly rent or monthly mortgage.

One such issue that is in danger of falling by the wayside is the pledge by both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties to rein in the "surveillance state".

This was not just a pledge made individually in each party's manifesto, it was a subsequent part of the coalition agreement and yet, without any hint of embarrassment, a sentence buried in the Strategic Defence Review announced plans to continue with the previous government's Intercept Modernisation Programme - in plain words, extending the ability of law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data from all of us. That means e-mails and other electronic communications that we might have expected to be private.

The government has ruled out any suggestion of a central "super database" but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users' details for a set period of time. It will allow government to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public.

This is tantamount to the Royal Mail opening all private letters and correspondence, photocopying it, placing it back in an envelope and delivering it - but keeping the copies on file for government agencies to read.I have no doubts that people would object to their mail being treated this way - so why the lack of outrage about e-mails being examined?

This is quite different from security services obtaining a warrant to "tap" a phone or intercept a suspect's e-mails - it is the infringement of everyone's correspondence on the basis that we are all potentially guilty until proven innocent.

The coalition cannot blame either party as their joint agreement stated that the new government would "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason". Well, it did not take long for that promise to be broken and it follows on from the government's decision to continue with the English NHS building what is called a Summary Care Record - a massive centralised database of health records. Again, this went against what was promised by both parties.

Doctors have managed well without such bureaucracy before and the record of NHS breeches of data is as long as it is horrendous. The difficulty that all of these broken promises pose is that there appears to be no way that the electorate can change the onward march of the surveillance state.

Labour started these policies and the opposition parties promised to end them. Many people took them on trust and voted for the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats for this reason. Now they have been betrayed. What next, a decision by the Home Secretary to carry on with identity cards after some terrorist outrage that such ID cards would not, in any event, prevent?

Where are supporters of individual civil liberties to turn? Fringe parties such as UKIP? If there is surveillance required it is surveillance of politicians and especially the propensity for power to act like a mind-altering drug bringing about complete about turns in policy.

The threat of the surveillance state invading our privacy is not of course confined to the state but we should at least be able to expect the state to police private operators so that they work within rules that we can all respect and obey. Sadly, the coalition shows no appetite for this fight either.

Last week there was a landmark debate in Westminster Hall attended by many MPs across various parties committed to our civil liberties. The subject under discussion was Google's use of cars driving around our streets capturing e-mail and wi-fi data for Google Street View.

In South Korea, Google's offices were raided following complaints about its information gathering and in the USA, thirty-eight states have joined together to challenge what it is doing. In New Zealand, Italy, Germany, France and other countries, the gathering of private e-mail traffic by Google's cars is being investigated.In Britain, however, the Information Commissioner cleared Google of any wrongdoing while the Metropolitan Police was in the middle of its own investigation.

Google has shown it has been willing to cooperate with the authorities but the fact that it could so easily just drive a car down a street and capture our private information, our passwords and our internet behaviour tells us what is now possible and what now has to be policed before others learn from Google and do the same.

The coalition certainly has a lot on its plate - but pulling back the surveillance state should be an easy win and now is the time to deliver.

• Brian Monteith is Policy Director of ThinkScotland.org