Our collective integration of the lessons of history is often frighteningly short term, with the issues of the day dominating thinking.

The key issue for me is less one of how the data is used or is intended to be used now (as important as that is to define), but the acid test of a changing political world in 5, 10 or 20 years. How might a future government or service that has, what we would consider today as extreme views, wish to use the data that will by then be totally accessible?

How might my (or your) life’s details, captured electronically be used? If the government of the day decided that a version of Sharia law (or some form of neo-Nazism) was the way to go, what protections for our collective civil liberties?

Without some form of constitutional protection – not subject to the will of fleeting parliamentary majority – how can we be sure we aren’t sowing the seeds of an Orwellian nightmare where we are all potential Winston Smiths, guilty of a thought crime, that would change the very fabric of the society in which we live?

Whatever reassurances might be given today, I can’t see anyway to square this circle without a written and unassailable constitution (the colonies did do some things worth copying). That’s the only way to give us some protections and an element of peace of mind that the consequences of our actions today aren’t the foundation for a state in which none of us would wish to live!