I love technology. Technology has made life exciting. I can sit here in PH Central checking the price of my Guinness share, mull over the latest corned beef news from Argentina and receive emails from Melissa in Tennessee offering me oral delicacies of another kind. We're living through a revolution that's faster and more exciting than any other since the brass age.

We take the pace of change for granted, yet it was only a few years ago that you had to ring Maureen at British Rail to get the time of the next train. After hanging on for 30 minutes she'd look it up in a weighty (and largely ficticious) tome and warble it back down the phone between puffs on her super strength Marlboro. Now you can grab the information for yourself with a few keystrokes or pick it up on your WAP phone quicker than you can curse at a beggar.

Crisps

Satellite navigation will soon be standard fitment in our cars. Satellites for Pete's sake?! How mad is it that we have space craft telling us how to get from HomebaseDIYitAllB&Q to Uncle Bert's retirement home whilst avoiding low bridges, cattle grids and oversized, chip-munching, lollipop ladies? It's the stuff of science fiction yet we take it all for granted.

Pretty much most of the predictions made by far fetched novels of a few decades ago are becoming reality. We drive around in slippery, silent, unidentifiable cars, personal communicators are standard, fingerprint recognition works, we can now do head transplants, cameras watch over our every move and we have 100 channels of TV pouring into our homes. The one disappointment so far is that girls still aren't dressing in lycra cat suits like Buck Rogers' sidekick.

Cheese

Yet not everyone is as excited about how many gigahertz I can get in my trousers. How many times have we heard people express the fear of being governed by 'Big Brother' in the last few years? Technology is moving at such a pace that by the time the Luddites have uttered their solitary statement, I've executed twenty million instructions on the various CPU's secreted about my torso.

We should be revelling in the opportunities that technology brings to the noble art of law enforcement. Yet plod remains in the dark ages polishing his truncheon and taking his sandwiches to work under his helmet. Whilst the rest of us were slaving away over a hot copy of MS Word, Z division was down at Rymans stocking up on notepads, coloured paperclips and Post-It notes. Your average copper now spends more time on paperwork than Jackie Collins. This leaves us out on the streets at the mercy of car jacking, lunatic, uninsured, joyriding lunatics, overloaded lorries, sleeping coach drivers, disqualified drivers, caravan hauling numpties and Ken Livingstone.

Britneys

You can be sure we have the technology available to sideline the scum on our roads. MI5 are no doubt using Sainsbury's Reward card scheme to track how many cans of Birds ready-made-custard I get through in a week. It's common knowledge that MI5 have tapped into Trafficmaster's system to follow all of us around the country. We know that all phone calls are monitored for 'semtex', 'speed' and 'Parker-Bowles'. We know that every time we download a dodgy picture from the internet that our Britney counter is incremented and we'll not be able to get that job in the girls school.

So why are we afraid of cameras that tell who hasn't paid their car tax? Why do we persist with silly bits of easy forged paper called 'MOTs' and insurance certificates? Why isn't that information just logged alongside our Britney counters? Why do I have to sign a scrappy bit of paper as Mickey Mouse every time I use my credit card? Why do people send forms to my house and then ask me to fill in my address? Why do I have to fill in a tax return telling the tax man how much tax I've given him?

Ducks

In every other aspect of our lives, from multi-coloured, hedgehog flavoured toilet ducks to personal digital assistants that remind us when to change our trollies, technology is improving our lot. Yet when it comes to crime prevention the Luddite, sandal chewing, technophobes are halting the advance of digital policing. They still prefer their pocket RAC diary to anything with electricity running through it and they don't understand that our privacy disappeared with the last episode of The Love Boat. We live in a society with a full audit trail now, so like it or emigrate.

It's time to cross reference all the databases. We should lock up anyone who fails the data integrity check or has still got an Austin Allegro taxed and insured. If your fingerprints don't match your postcode, or your national insurance number doesn't tie up with your dental records then it should be straight down the nearest Victorian prison for a bit of slopping out with Jeffrey Archer. And while we're at it let's barcode Tony Blair.