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Does this sound familiar? ‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment... It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. You had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and every movement scrutinised.’

So wrote George Orwell 60 years ago in the archetypal dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a classic which gave us Big Brother, Newspeak and the Thought Police. Rarely a day passes without a newspaper referencing the work, whether in a story about a giant centralised government database, ID cards or CCTV cameras. It has become something of a cliché to refer to the novel when discussing the growth of surveillance in this country – but it is not trite to say there has been a creeping erosion of our personal privacy. With some who want to keep a record of all our email and phone communications, retain innocent citizens’ DNA, issue us with ID cards and keep a close eye on us through 4.5m unregulated CCTV cameras, it’s no exaggeration to say that Big Brother is watching us.

But the Orwellian nightmare is about much more than assaults on privacy. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a world where freedoms of speech, protest, thought and association are non-existent, where prohibition from torture and the right to life are regularly violated by the State. Never in our lifetime, surely? Yet consider this: the document that protects these fundamental rights in this country is maligned as a charter for terrorists and even the world’s greatest democracies punish without trial and make excuses for torture. But we can’t lay full blame at the feet of politicians; the quickest route to the loss of our freedoms is our complacency. Our vigilance is necessary to keep Nineteen Eighty-Four a work of fiction.

The civil rights organisation Liberty, the first president of which was EM Forster, is 75 this year. See www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk

Further reading

Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Penguin
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Discover a selection of classic Orwell here