The time, since you ask, has just gone 13. It is later than you think, and very few have noticed. What is there left to say, really, when even prophetic literature is out of date? You probably remember the joke about satire dying when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel prize for "peace". The work of George Orwell may have suffered the same fate when Alan Johnson, jolly home secretary and potential Labour Party leader, last week dismissed the £20 billion cost of a database intended to track 60 million souls as "diddly squat".

Diddly squat. Orwell would have winced. He winced a lot, I think, especially when language was made a political prisoner. He might also have guessed, though Johnson probably did not, that the Americanism alludes to excrement. But since when did new Labour give a crap about words, or the liberty of the individual?

Sixty years after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we almost have the lot, the things near-unimaginable in June 1949. Johnson may have decided that biometric ID cards need not be compulsory, but the giant database will do nicely. If you fail to register you will be denied a passport and forbidden to leave the country. No-one in government finds the notion in the least fantastic. And that, of course, is also fantastic in the proper, Orwellian sense of the word.

So curse about it under the glassy stare of the CCTV cameras- for someone is indeed watching you. Assail it in those emails they mean to log, and on those websites they monitor. Bitch on your mobile: it tells them exactly where you are. Head for the hills, if you like, but remember that they can and will "recognise" your number plate, observe your use of any plastic card, and rummage in your bank account at will. For starters.

Orwell did not predict the technology - who did? - but his sense of political tendencies was exact. He saw the surveillance society coming even as Europe was being liberated. In 1944 he wrote: "The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside." But isn't that the common delusion? Isn't that why, as Orwell foresaw, the majority remain complacently content as their liberties evaporate one after the other? Winston Smith, remember, was the exception to an iron rule.

Like most novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not wholly original. Orwell had certainly read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, first published in 1924, in a French or English translation. He conceded that the Russian book - individuals reduced to numbers by the "One State"; a hero roused to rebellion by an enigmatic woman - was the model for his own novel. But Aldous Huxley's Brave New World shared the same debt, and offered another influence. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are traces, too, of Poe, of Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon, and of Jack London's The Iron Heel.

The important difference is that Zamyatin was reflecting his direct, miserable experience of Stalinism. Huxley's novel, meanwhile, contains no politics to speak of. Orwell's triumph was to spot the insidious worm at the heart of democracy itself, to see it here and (almost) now, and to show how it can poison language. Nineteen Eighty-Four is "about" a lot of things, but it is lodged in the culture, long after the passing of Stalin, because it says that words are power. Orwell was not writing about diddly squat.

Zamyatin's "D-503" ends his diary having been cured of his "ravings": "I smile; I cannot help but smile: they have extracted some sort of sliver out of my head." Orwell's Winston Smith, the "long-hoped-for" bullet entering his brain, wins that famous "victory over himself" and loves Big Brother. "For," as the Russian put it, "rationality must conquer". And what could be more rational than to ensure that a computer database justifies its own existence?

Zamyatin was writing about a species of totalitarianism both foreign and familiar. His fiction is only a step away from the attempts by Iran's mullahs to control internet access and satellite TV. The world of We might almost be an inspiration to the Chinese autocrats who hesitate, for now, over fitting all private computers with self-censoring software. But those peoples, we tell ourselves, are not free, not like us. Orwell said otherwise: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Have you listened to a government minister recently?

Here is the "B vocabulary"; the "words which have been deliberately constructed for political purposes". Here are "outcomes", "inputs", "assessments", "ongoing at this moment in time", even (with straight faces) "manifesto commitments". More seriously, here are "rights", never indivisible, but "balanced against responsibilities". Above all, here are those vast paradoxical statements - lies, Orwell would have said - deployed without hesitation or shame. First and above all: freedoms must be sacrificed in order to preserve "freedom". In our own interests. Whether we like it or not.

For those below, those in the lower depths of elite consciousness, there is prolefeed, sexcrime, bellyfeel, joycamp, thinkpol and the rest. So: watch a bit of Britain's Got Talent, get pregnant, grab a burger, book a package trip and grumble about MPs' expenses. You can attempt your own permutations. Then you can note that, while few speak and write entirely in 2009's Newspeak, some of our media do their patriotic part: "The leading articles in The Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist." Indeed.

But do we really live in anything resembling the bleak universe of Winston Smith? Few believe it. The priests of the new order, sometimes to be found writing in The Times, will tell you that the ability even to ask refutes the question. They would mention my liberty to publish these paranoid ramblings, and your freedom to read them. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been in print, in millions of copies, for 60 years; Zamyatin was never allowed to publish We in the USSR. Problem solved, then.

And true enough. You are as free as a chattering bird to say that Gordon Brown is a rotten prime minister, or to demand to know why Simon Cowell is such a bitch. But ask why a bystander can be clubbed and killed at a G20 protest, or wonder how Airstrip One came to be involved in Oceania's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, or doubt the state's right to claim ownership of personal identity, then Nineteen Eighty-Four becomes newly persuasive. What Noam Chomsky likes to call manufactured consent is the mere appearance, the bent words and reassuring video facsimiles, of actual democracy.

Orwell's novel isn't the best book ever written and, equally, the accusation of plagiarism regarding Zamyatin is hard to refute. You could add that he too was a propagandist, that his journalism was sometimes suspect, and that, if observed, his strictures on writing, famously in the essay "Politics and the English Language", would have strangled many novels at birth.

It doesn't matter. They once gave me the Orwell Prize (for "political journalism") and left me to wonder over ironies in the Reform Club, of all dusty places. I remember thinking that he would not have cared much for my prose ("decadent"), and that I didn't much care for socialists who supplied lists of suspect lefties to the security services. I regard Coming Up For Air and most of the other fictions as actually bad. I honour Homage To Catalonia, but I know a partial (in each sense) journalistic account when I see one. Still.

Orwell framed our world. If you must get a prize, I thought, better in his name than any other. He was a paradox, too, after all: afraid for liberty's sake, he helped to keep the idea of liberty alive. He defied his own prophecy. And he said you must break all those famous rules for writing "sooner than say anything outright barbarous". He made new Labour look like diddly squat.