WE don't know how the other half lives - or at least how the other half used to have to live.

I've just got back from a conference in the beautiful Wiltshire town of Malmesbury. We were there to talk about freedom. The conference leader asked us to read George Orwell's novel 1984 - which is the famously frightening story about the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in Britain.

Ours was an international conference, but the most important members of it were men and women from Russia, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For, whereas we English and Americans had to imagine what a dictatorship might be like, these eastern Europeans had actually lived through the nightmare itself. Here are a few of their remarks:

"I taught history at the university in Prague. Of course my syllabus was prescribed for me by the Communist government. My students knew that what I was teaching was lies. I knew that their essay answers were lies also, written to toe the party line - because to write anything else would be to attract the immediate attention of the secret police."

"Our daughter was asked each morning at primary school, 'Did your mummy and daddy have any guests for supper last night? Did you hear what they were talking about?'"

"In the 1980s I was a student myself and I distributed copies of George Orwell's 1984 in Czechoslovakia. If I had been caught, I would have been imprisoned and possibly even shot."

"My father was arrested on the trumped up charge of being a spy for the west. He was accused of acting as an agent for capitalist France. Of course he was nothing of the kind. He had never even met a Frenchman. He was kept in prison for five years and for a whole year of that time he was regularly tortured."

There we all were in Malmesbury's gorgeous autumn colours, historians, philosophers, teachers, clergy around the table - every one of us in silent tears. We felt ashamed of ourselves because, whatever our grumbles at the British political system, none of us had suffered the atrocities that our friends from eastern Europe had endured. And we said so. It was then that one of the Hungarians said: "No, don't be ashamed of yourselves. For you in the West are slowly building up for yourselves a tyranny such as we suffered in the East.

"Your government intrudes ever further into your private lives and even tries to dictate the sort of food you eat. Pastimes are actually being banned - like smoking and hunting. Every day new regulations are coming into force. Your political correctness means that there are things you are not allowed to say. Your language is being doctored so that words which are disapproved will no longer exist in daily speech. And once that happens, there will be things you will not even able to think - just like the people in Orwell's novel, just as we were."

What this man said next has haunted me ever since I returned home. "Why, when we have at last got rid of dictatorship in the East, are you so keen to rebuild something like it in the West?"

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.