I HAD long thought we live in a proud country, free of all tyranny and coercion.

Then I read that 64,000 parents have been fined for taking out their children from school for a week or so in term-time.

Well of course it’s generous of the Government to provide us with state education, even out of our own money – except that this education is lousy.

Don’t take my crabbed prejudice for it: the Department of Education’s own figures tell us that, after 11 years of full-time education, 43 per cent of pupils leave school unable to read, write and count efficiently.

It’s bad enough that children are subjected to this mediocrity, but the cruellest cut is that state education is compulsory. And any transgressing parents unwilling to pay the fine might go to jail. This is not democracy.

This is not civilisation or culture. It is totalitarianism pure and simple.

And in any case, what the devil is the state doing to involve itself in education?

When there was such a thing as a good education – in ancient Athens, say or during the Middle Ages – the state kept its acquisitive nose out of it.

The socialist superstition that the state should be the universal provider of all goods is the most nonsensical and wicked dogma of our time. The duties of the state are few: to guard the nation against foreign enemies and to keep the peace in our streets.

This notion that government is responsible for every detail of our daily lives – how much we eat, drink, how long we sleep, just how fat we’re allowed to be – is outrageous.

But, since the disaster of the Labour landslide in the 1945 General Election, we have come to take it for granted that the state is responsible for everything. Hence the appropriate phrase: nanny state. But nanny’s soft glove conceals an iron fist. We need a reaction, an uprising, against all this destructive rubbish.

But back to the schools for a minute… Why shouldn’t I take my children out of school and on holiday for a couple of weeks?

It’s cheaper in term-time. Or do lefties only pretend to be concerned about the poor?

After all, what would they miss? A reprise of that lesson which indoctrinated them earlier about how cruel and incompetent our general officers commanding were in the First World War? Or that other lesson – very practical, this one – about how to put a condom on a banana?

But never mind the matter of holidays, one of the parents fined was the mother of children whose own mother was dying from brain cancer. The old lady needed attention 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The parent, the old lady’s daughter, was in desperate need of respite care, and so were her children. So she withdrew them from school for a bit. For this, she was arraigned and told that she had committed an offence and, if she didn’t agree to pay the fine, she would go to jail.

I ask you, what kind of bureaucratic dung heap of control-freakery are we living in?

Is this supposed to compassionate, enlightened, understanding and kind.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort. It is government by ideology and edict. In other words, it is tyranny. Education, health, welfare, social policy and community life – in all these things we need the tyrannical, selfrighteous state to get off our backs.

Leave us alone. It’s called freedom.