I ENJOYED a delightful break in Bournemouth last weekend. I love English seaside hotels. You get a proper breakfast, not the slimy cheese and tasteless ham of the so-called continental breakfast which resembles a funeral tea, washed down with a cup of stewed coffee.

I was singing for my supper, giving a talk to the Freedom Association’s annual conference.

And what fun it was. It was what the party conferences used to be before they became all puritanical and politically-correct, with their bureaucratic “screening processes”

and press quotas. The bar was open until 5am, which was nice to know, though I lack the stamina these days and my carousing comes to its somnolent end around 10pm.

Lively outfit, The Freedom Association (TFA). It stands for individual liberty and protests against the petty totalitarianisms – and the not-so-petty totalitarianisms – which try to boss us about. TFA was founded in 1975 by Viscount De L’isle and Ross and Norris McWhirter. The Association was thought to be such a threat that the IRA assassinated Ross McWhirter in November of that year.

I like conferences where you learn stuff.

About TV licences, for example – that state propaganda tax we are all required to pay if we wish to avoid prosecution. There are 4,000 prosecutions every week for licence-dodging: that’s one-in-ten of all the cases which come before the courts. The way it works is sinister and nasty.

If they suspect you haven’t paid the licence fee, the BBC – but it’s not the BBC, it’s the Television Licence Authority – will harass you by endless letters and door-stepping. Except there isn’t really a TV Licence Authority.

They parcel out the job to a firm called Capita who run it as a sort of franchise with agents paid commission on results. Interesting to learn that there is a parliamentary group which aims to decriminalise non-payment of the licence, to make it a civil rather than a criminal offence. I learned that this could make things worse.

For, if you have a civil judgement against you in the County Court, this means you are automatically blacklisted and will find it nearly impossible to get credit for anything you want to buy. In any case it’s preposterous that we are compelled to pay a poll tax in order to keep afloat a lefty department of propaganda.

Another taxpayer-funded bureaucracy, state education – that failed system which nurtures compliance and institutes mediocrity – is compulsory. Just try not sending your children to school. The Stasi will be round next morning. Parents are being fined for withdrawing their kids to take them on holiday in term time – because the prices go up in the school holidays.

Are we living in a democracy or under Joseph Stalin?

The worst, the symbol and summing-up of all that threatens our liberty is, of course, the EU. This is the Empire of Lies promoted by that arch-liar Ted Heath who told us it was just a common market while all the time he was working for “ever-closer political union”

and the European Superstate, the Sovietisation of the countries of Europe. And this is what we now have. We are governed not by the Queen’s ministers in our democraticallyelected parliament, but by statutes drawn up by unelected commissioners in Brussels and Strasbourg. Dammit, they are so corrupt they haven’t even signed off their annual accounts for 19 years.

Three cheers for the English breakfast – and outfits like the Freedom Association.