Blunkett and Livingstone are planning to run our lives

How much simpler life would be if evil or wrong-headed men wore horns rather than winning ways. David Blunkett is a man of considerable charm.

Decorous and thoughtful, he would bridle at his initiatives as Home Secretary being put through the lens of personal circumstances: but when a man has a character that overcomes severe physical limitations and a temperament untouched by bitterness at a pretty wretched hand of cards - the workplace death of his father in a vat of boiling water and a culture that discouraged the blind Blunkett from academic achievement - one wants him to be on the side of the angels.

Ken Livingstone has an appeal of a different sort. People naturally warm to the laddish and forthright Mr Livingstone. Londoners love him as the champion of the ordinary man. Mr Livingstone appears to enjoy the boozy parties of low lives - the inevitable outcome of which can be seen in front of magistrates every Monday morning.

After one such occasion last May, as reported by the Evening Standard, Mr Livingstone had an argument with his pregnant girlfriend over her smoking and, when another mate tried to interfere, he ended up at the foot of some stairs. I have no idea who did or didn't push whom, but a man has a right to fight with his girlfriend without third parties sticking their nose in it.

Mr Livingstone's real crime is that he couldn't muster his fabled honesty to say that his domestic arguments are his own business and, if people don't like it, they can take the consequences.

Next February, Mr Livingstone hopes to activate his traffic "congestion" charges. A key section of central London has been designated by him as a toll area. London residents who own cars outside this area - and the majority do - will have to pay £5 a day to drive in there, as well as anyone coming in from outside London.

The conditions under which these charges are to be imposed are draconian: you must pay the £5 charge by 8pm the same day or it becomes £10. The earliest a pass can be bought is the night before, so spontaneous detours will entail both the charge and then the inconvenience of paying it within hours. Cameras will monitor every road into the zone. Taxis and minicabs are exempt. Exemptions also extend, naturally, to unspecified "non-commercial" local authority vehicles.

Red Ken is well on his way to creating the Soviet road scheme of an empty road lane for the nomenklatura. This is maniacal. How can it be that, in Britain, local government has the power to place such restrictions on the individual's personal liberty, mobility and property rights?

Cars are licensed for use on public roads: Mr Livingstone's scheme severely compromises the ability of people to use their own cars freely. In addition, it also restricts access to public roads and all for purely ideological reasons. Traffic "congestion" is caused by ordinary people choosing to have cars, not flocks of millionaires or covens of criminals.

Congestion could be alleviated by more fly-overs, tunnels or roads but, ultimately, congestion resolves itself when the sheer inconvenience is too much for drivers. Mr Livingstone's goal is not to reduce congestion: it is to coerce people on to public transport and to eliminate the private car.

Londoners who support this policy may think it a punishment for those people Mr Livingstone describes as "selfishly" driving around in their own cars. Ironically, his policy is a gift to the wealthy. They won't blink at the £1,260 yearly pass and will have staff to do the paperwork while they enjoy emptier roads.

Mr Livingstone, a proud socialist with "faith in the socialist vision", rides the wave of Left-wing statism. His "vision" for London promises lots of cheap housing and better transport through social engineering and backroom deals. Such a vision is, as Simon Jenkins pointed out on ITV's Carlton Debate last week, pretty much a "crock of gold".

Mr Livingstone does not bother to hide his crudely formed political views. "Capitalism has killed more people than Hitler," he said recently. This would be true only if we included, as victims of capitalism, the 70 million murdered by Red Ken's Communist role models.

Mr Blunkett is cut from different cloth. He has said that he is still debating the extent of the state's role in the individual's life, though his policies would indicate that the state has won and he is a committed Right-wing statist. Many Tories approve of his stance on asylum seekers. Third Way people approve of his reclassification of marijuana. Mr Blunkett is the cultivated, modern product of statism.

Both he and Mr Livingstone are attacking individual liberty here, in the very land that was the first nation to attach a value to individual liberty under the law. Mr Blunkett's attempted monitoring of our e-mail and mobile phone data has been rejected. But statism, or more accurately "neo-feudalism", is making inroads. His consultation paper last week on multi-purpose "entitlement" cards is an alarming step forward.

It is easy to explain why we fear what will effectively be an identity card but the hard truth is that we should have worried about them a long time ago: by now it is several National Insurance cards too late. All we can do is try to stop the state from getting even more enumerative powers over us. Nor do we want to compromise our lack of privacy further.

Privacy is inseparable from human dignity. We can all answer legitimate inquiries from the state to help it make wise policy decisions - in such areas as the number of cars in one's household - so long as these queries are on an anonymous basis. My ability as a human being not to have to surrender information about myself and not to be obliged by law to reveal details I don't wish to reveal is intrinsic to the maintenance of my dignity.

Every encroachment on this privacy has been used by the state as an excuse for more. We did not object when photos were put on our driver's licence, so why should we object when those photo licences are merged with a benefit card? Everything is justified as in our own interests: this new card, Mr Blunkett tells us, will protect us from fraud and illegal immigrants and prevent the theft of our identity.

This is Al Capone's technique: "We're not here to rob you," the Chicago gangsters would say. "Pay up and we'll prevent you from being robbed - or else." It is the old protection racket. Mr Livingstone does it with a blunt instrument and Mr Blunkett with a sophisticated programme, but the result is the same: give the state more power and they will see to it that gridlock and terrorists won't get us -or else. The entitlement card isn't exactly compulsory, but without one, you will be disentitled.

Furthermore, the card's promised benefits may be illusory. As more and more information is gathered on to one card, criminals will be able to access and hijack our identity even more easily. Rather than steal several pieces of information, they will have everything neatly packaged for them.

No matter what we invent - eye scans, fingerprints - there will be some way of breaking the security. There always has been. This will be as true for foreign agents stealing identities and information as it will be for the ordinary crooks devising means to scan our cards when we use them.

The card will not contain "intrusive personal data" such as tax or medical records without our "consent", promises Mr Blunkett. No doubt he means it. But every time we give information to the Government - or indeed to private sources - we are guaranteed confidentiality and these promises have invariably been broken. It may have been because the courts decided that some need was more important.

Whatever, if there is one thing we know it is this: information we share with the government will be available to other branches of the government or other people. Those of us who have worked in investigative journalism know, too, that once data is collected there are any number of people who through bribery or malice will share it. Private detectives have long since stopped "gumshoe" techniques. Now, they simply have their operatives in every key area where data is kept.

Men such as Mr Blunkett and Mr Livingstone are elected because their attractive human qualities mask any dangers they pose. I have little hope that Red Ken will ever see the appeal of individual liberty. Perhaps it is because I personally admire Mr Blunkett that I hope he will find his way back.

Meanwhile, look out. There's a whiff of the Soviet model of the all-powerful Interior Ministry hovering about the Home Office as it proposes central control of selected chief constables and tries to acclimatise us to the notion of a de facto identity card. Perhaps that card will be used for instant payment of Mr Livingstone's congestion charges.