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Lord Carlisle of Berriew, Britain's one-man watchdog snapping at the heels of anti-terrorist legislation, has called on the government's stop and search system to be scrapped because it is poisoning relations between the police and the public. Like the system of criminal records checks which treats every parent helping out with school activities as a paedophile, it should go.

The present stop and search system was introduced under the Terrorism Act 2000. It gave the police powers to stop and search people, without having to give reasons, in areas specified by ministers. You might have thought the idea was to stop people with rucksacks who were eyeing up nuclear power stations or water treatment plants. But within weeks of the Act being passed, ministers declared the whole of London a stop and search area. So police can now stop anyone anywhere the metropolis, at any time, with no reason. As indeed, they do.

Of course, the bureaucratic mentality makes it worse, because in order to prove that they are not discriminating against particular groups, the police have to fill out yellow forms with your name, address, sex, height, race and much more on it. The result is that what ought to be a friendly enquiry ('You've been standing outside this government office quite a time, sir, can I ask your purpose?' 'Oh, simple as that, eh?' Very good, sir, thank you, have a nice day.') into something adversarial – and where the police have all the muscle: refuse to give your details or tell them not to be so daft and boil their heads, and you will be arrested. No wonder that the public now see the police not as their servants and protectors, but as agents of a bully state.

Eamonn Butler's DIY manual for fixing Britain – The Alternative Manifesto – is now out! Get it here.

We are continually being told that the causes of crime are both complex, built into the very structures of our society, and simple: it's all inequality, innit? Poverty, deprivation, righteous anger at the greed of the rich: fill in your own quotations from Polly Toynbee here.

However, there's another theory entirey: that much crime, if not most of it, is opportunistic. It takes place because those who would have more and are willing to get more through either violence or other illegality meet up with those who have the more and cannot defend it. Our problem is of course that we very rarely get the sort of natural experiment that we need in order to test which of these two is correct: or, if we are to be fair, or both could have some relevance, which explains the greater part of it. Rarely, but not never:

The Baltimore example is that over the period of the recent blizzards – when most potential victims were stationary, and not accessible to the police, the crime rate dropped.

For example, murders – of which there were 18 in the first 37 days of the year – dropped to 0 in 9 days.

Now it certainly isn't possibly true that inequality, poverty, deprivation or righteous anger dropped in those days of the snowstorms. It's also most certainly not true that policing had anything to do with it as they were as trapped as everyone else. No, we're rather left with our second explanation: the root cause of crime appears to be the opportunity to commit a crime. When that opportunity isn't there, nor is the crime.

The ASI has long campaigned against intrusive government; they lack the right to pry into citizen's lives, and cannot be trusted to look after and use the information they amass responsibly. And now, new polling by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust suggests that the average Joe is becoming increasingly wary government activity too.

63% of those questioned were worried about the government holding data on them, up from 53% in the 2006 poll. 53% respondents now believe that ID cards are a 'bad' or even worse idea; a staggering leap from opposition of 33% in 2006. In addition, 56% of people think government power too centralized, while a massive 88% of respondents want local communities to have more say over decisions that effect them.

What these figures clearly show is that people are becoming fed up of government projects that gather and centralize information and power. Indeed, the significant rise in the number of people who are concerned about the Big Brother state is striking. The current low standing of politicians and past scandals with lost data have surely gone some way to increase the public's aversion to the retention of personal information. However, somewhere along line, New Labour's erosion of our privacy has also caused people to switch from thinking 'If I have done nothing wrong than I have nothing to hide', to having real apprehension about government's plans.

Obviously, the incumbent government is charging full steam ahead with Operation Observation, by rolling out ID cards on a (for now) voluntary basis to the 16-24 year olds of London. While both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have pledged to scrap the cards, neither party has developed a meaningful agenda to really break down the monolithic state that currently looms over Britain and sucks in political and economic power at every opportnity. In politics, too much information and power is held by too few, and the Rowntree poll results suggest that a tipping point in the nation's tolerance could well be approaching.