A Young Intellectual's Guide to Freedom

A Young Intellectual's Guide to Freedom

by Robert Jameson

Copyright 2013 Robert Jameson

Warning/Disclaimer

This book shouldn't offend anyone - but, with so many ridiculously over-sensitive people around these days, there's always a danger that it will. Please note, therefore, that you read this book at your own risk. Furthermore, please note that this book is intended to present ideas rather than facts. No guarantee is being made about the factual accuracy of any of the information presented in this book.

Introduction

It has often been the job of intellectuals to inspire people to value and protect their freedoms and to fight to regain freedoms that tyrannical governments and oppressive societies have taken away. Most of my books are part of this ongoing fight for freedom. I encourage people to regain their intellectual freedoms through questioning the accepted ideas of the society they live in.

There is, however, a problem. Our societies and our education systems are failing to prepare young people to be able to understand intellectual ideas and participate in intellectual conversations, even on such important issues as our fundamental freedoms. If I point to a news story and say, "That's rather Orwellian!" or, "What is this? 1984?" many school leavers will have no idea what I'm referring to. They're lacking in knowledge of key reference points that are used to convey important ideas. It is no wonder their brains turn to mush when they don't have the means to take part in an intellectual conversation.

Young people are leaving school without the basic sets of tools and basic awareness to be able to participate in the sorts of normal intellectual conversations that reasonably educated people might well have. They're just not familiar with the basic common reference points within which intellectual discussions can take place.

This book is intended for young adults and anyone else who would like to rectify this problem. It is for people who would like to enhance their intellectual awareness and be better able to participate in the ongoing quest for freedom.

From the Magna Carta to The Matrix, this book is designed to give young intellectuals a firm foundation in the language, stories, characters and ideas of freedom.

Robin Hood is a legendary character of English folklore. He is the hero of many stories, songs, plays, books and, in more modern times, films and television series. Most commonly, but not always, he is portrayed as having lived many hundreds of years ago in Sherwood forest, near Nottingham in central England. He is famous for being prodigiously skilled with a bow and arrow and for having a band of followers known as his 'merry men,' most of whom seem to have a particular fondness for the colour green. Little John, Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet are amongst his most well-known companions. He is often also portrayed as being very much in love with the fair Maid Marian.

Most importantly of all, however, Robin Hood was an outlaw - he was a criminal, a thief, a robber, a bandit. He lived in the forest in order to escape from the law - and especially from his arch-enemy, the pitiless Sheriff of Nottingham.

Was Robin Hood real? Well, there are many references to people known as Robin Hood or 'Robyne Hude' in historical documents. It seems that, at certain times, the name was used as a sort of nickname for any wandering thief. It may be that some of Robin Hood's exploits and adventures were based on those of real people. On the whole, however, the Robin Hood we know of is an invention of popular fiction.

It isn't really particularly important whether Robin Hood was real. Sometimes, a legend can be more important than the truth. It's not about the facts - it's about the principles and ideals that the stories represent. What's of enormous cultural importance here, is that, in the Robin Hood stories, the outlaw, the law-breaker, the criminal is the good guy and the authorities are the bad guys.

We are used to regarding Robin Hood as a hero, but, in many ways, the legend of Robin Hood is a thoroughly subversive one. In other words, it is one that questions the authority of the state, of officials, of rulers and even of the law.

The stories of Robin Hood highlight the fact that legal is not the same as right and that illegal is not the same as wrong. The stories question whether theft is wrong. They question whether it really is wrong to take up arms against the authorities. They question whether law enforcers, courts and judges should be respected and obeyed.

Some politically-correct versions may try to portray him otherwise, but, generally, Robin Hood is very definitely portrayed as a thief. He stole, but he was still a good guy, because, at least much of the time, he 'stole from the rich and gave to the poor.'

Robin Hood is far more than a character in stories where there is a lot of action - chasing about, firing arrows and sword-fighting. The Robin Hood story is a celebration of non-conformism. Robin Hood refuses to conform to the orders from people in authority, he refuses to abide by the rules of society and he refuses to abide by the law. It is a story about freedom - not just the sense of freedom that comes from living in the open, from living with nature in the forest, but the more general freedom of being able to live your life according to your own rules, free from the oppressions of authoritarian masters. The story boldly supports the notion that we should take risks for freedom, that we should fight for freedom and perhaps, if necessary, even lie, steal or kill for freedom.

Think about it; we've made a hero out of a villain! Yes, he stole. Yes, he broke the law. He was a bandit, but he's also a hero because, unlike his adversaries, he stood firmly on the side of freedom and justice, even when the law of the land didn't.

Robin Hood fought against the rulers and laws of England, but he isn't a villain as far as the people of England are concerned - he's the very essence of Englishness. He's an eccentric, non-conformist. He's a freedom-fighter and a principled, heroic subversive.

This fine tradition of subversiveness is something that people and cultures from many parts of the world do not understand. There are many places where you can still be arrested and imprisoned for 'subversion.' There are many places where people are dangerously subservient and deferential to authority and almost anyone in an official uniform.

The Robin Hood legend is far more than an adventure story. It is of great cultural importance because it encourages us to celebrate the outsider, the outlaw, the non-conformist, the adventurer and to always question the dictates of those in authority and of the law itself.

Despite the continued popularity of Robin Hood, however, I wonder if he's the sort of person we might respect if he's in a fictional story or if he's fighting in some far-off part of the world, but who society often dislikes and derides when he's fighting here at home against our own government.

Too often, our fine tradition of subversiveness often goes largely ignored in modern England. Sometimes, we in England have to look to others - some of our friends in the United States, for example - to champion the subversiveness that we used to cherish and nurture, but too often, these days, neglect. It's time we made a renewed effort to reacquaint ourselves with Robin Hood's non-conformist values and his great passion for freedom.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a philosopher and he and his ideas are intimately associated with the cause of freedom.

His most famous work was, 'On Liberty,' and the view he most famously supported and promoted was basically that the state, the government and their representatives - the police and other officials, for example - should no way in hell just have the right to tell you, as an individual, what you can and can't do unless they have a very, very good reason for doing so.

He asked when the government or the state might be justified in restricting your individual liberty. When should it be allowed to tell you you can't do something? When should it be allowed to compromise on your freedoms? The answer he came up with, argued for and promoted was essentially very simple: The state should only restrict your individual freedoms in order to stop you restricting the freedom of others.

So, some simple examples: Mill would argue that the state is perfectly justified in stopping you committing murders because, if you murder someone, that takes away their freedom. Generally, if you physically harm other people, you are taking their freedom away in some way. If you break their legs, this obviously restricts their movement, but any violence or threat of violence can obviously stop people going about the streets and going about their lives as they see fit. The state is also justified in stopping you kidnapping people, because that obviously takes away their freedom too. And if you steal, that obviously takes away someone else's freedom to use their own possessions. The state, therefore, may be able to justify putting you in prison if that's what's necessary to stop you murdering, harming or stealing from other people.

On the other hand, the state is not justified in taking your freedom away simply because it doesn't like what you are doing. It also shouldn't stop you saying things just because it doesn't like or doesn't agree with what you are saying. Even if you say racist or sexist things, that doesn't really restrict the freedom of others. They are still free to argue back at you and tell you what they think of your bigoted opinions. The fact that they or the state doesn't like what you are saying is irrelevant. You're not taking away anyone else's freedoms, so the state shouldn't restrict your freedom to speak your mind.

In short, Mill argued in defence of individual liberty and against allowing the state to override our individual freedoms, except in the defence of other people's freedoms.

In truth, Mill himself was not as firm on the key principles of liberty as perhaps he could have been. He was a 'utilitarian.' In other words, he argued on the basis that society would be better off if his libertarian principles were followed. This is different from arguing on the basis that liberty is or should be a fundamental human right.

Nevertheless, his work has been hugely influential in underpinning our ideas of fundamental human rights based upon a recognition that freedom matters. Liberty is at the heart of what makes us alive and is the foundation of so much of what makes life worth living.

The word, 'document' normally refers to something rather dull and boring. Novels might be exciting, but 'documents' are generally very, very dull. Not so the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta (meaning simply, 'Great Charter') is one of the most important and most exciting documents in all of history.

The Magna Carta is a great document about freedom. It is considered by some to be the greatest, most important, most influential constitutional document of all time. Many great documents about the rights and principles of a fair and decent society can trace their ancestry back to the Magna Carta.

The original version of the Magna Carta was first issued in 1215. At the time, King John (of England) was unpopular with many of his subjects, including many of his powerful barons. Essentially, these barons and other powerful people got together and insisted and forced King John to agree to the conditions contained in the Magna Carta. He didn't actually sign it, but it was given the King's seal (an indentation of the King's symbol made in hot wax).

The impact of this document can be felt almost everywhere today in any reasonably civilised society. It is regarded as a ground-breaking document because it was a document about rights and liberties and freedoms. It said that the king could no longer do whatever the hell he wanted. It made the king, in some ways, accountable to those beneath him. It was, therefore, in a sense, revolutionary. It said that the king himself must be subject to the laws and rules of his country. It established that (free) people should have certain fundamental rights and freedoms that even the king (or the state) had no right to take away. So many of the rights and freedoms many of us are lucky enough to enjoy today, trace their origins back to the Magna Carta.

It is important to realise that, for much of human history (and in much of the world even today), there have been many rulers who pretty much did what they pleased. This meant that life for the ordinary person, and even for barons, was always under threat from their rulers. You could not call your life your own. Whatever freedom you had, could be taken away at a moment's notice, by the people above you in the chain of command. 'The law' of the land was little more than the orders of the king. Your very life or that of your whole family could be snatched away because the king took a sudden and irrational and unjustifiable dislike to you, to something you did, to something you said or even just as the result of a nasty rumour. The Magna Carta, in time, changed all this.

The Magna Carta presses the idea that the law works both ways. It should be for everyone, including the King or the Prime Minister or the President. Even when the king is still allowed to make the laws of the country, he must still be subject to the laws himself. Not even the king is above the law. This basic principle is phenomenally important and is known as, 'The Rule of Law.'

'The Rule of Law' means that, if the king makes murder illegal, then he himself can be prosecuted if he murders someone. It may seem obvious that this ought to be the case, but for most countries throughout much of history, this has not been the case. Even in many supposedly democratic countries today, the principle of the rule of law is often ignored. The President or Prime Minister of the country is given immunity from prosecution under the laws that everyone else in the country is subject to. It is instructive to observe the high levels of corruption such countries often suffer from.

Many other important rights and freedoms, such as the right of an arrested person to be brought before a proper court for a fair trial (often referred to as the principle or right of 'habeas corpus') or the principle of 'innocent unless proven guilty,' may not have been clearly defined by the Magna Carta itself, but are arguably inferred by it or derived from it.

The actual historical events surrounding the 'signing' of the original Magna Carta can be over-romanticised. The original Magna Carta of 1215 was mainly a charter for a bunch for rich and privileged barons rather than ordinary people. It was also not the first document of its kind - it borrowed heavily from other, similar documents that preceded it. Furthermore, as soon as the barons had gone home, King John quickly reneged on the promises he had made in the Magna Carta. In this, he had the support of the pope, who ruled that the king was not bound by the commitments he had made.

Fortunately, however, King John soon died and a later version of the Magna Carta was formally incorporated into English law in 1297. This version remains part of English law to this day (although most of the actual clauses have been repealed). And, of course, the most important thing is not the document itself, but the principles that it supported. The Magna Carta was a key foundation stone for the responsibilities and freedoms that formed the basis of the free societies that developed over the next 800 years.

The legacy of the Magna Carta is not confined to England. When English colonists went abroad - to America for example - colonies were sometimes founded using charters that established rights and freedoms similar to those in the Magna Carta. The US constitution is, in many parts, derived from the Magna Carta.

In a very obvious sense, the US Declaration of Independence represents a break from Britain. The US was leaving the British Empire. In a far more important sense, however, the declaration of independence represents a resounding affirmation of the values and principles of America's very British heritage.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Where do these ideas come from? What is this statement? Would it ever have been made if it were not for the ideas of rights and principles that were founded upon or derived from the Magna Carta?

It is ironic that America's declaration of independence from Britain should so emphatically endorse the shared principles of our two peoples. The disagreements between the two governments of the time have proven, over the centuries, to be as nothing compared to our shared beliefs in the key principles of freedom. The Declaration of Independence was a break from Britain, but it was a resounding affirmation of British values of justice and freedom.

To give you an idea of the esteem with which the Magna Carta is held and the importance attached to it and to the ideas it represents; in 2007, a copy of the 1297 version of the Magna Carta was sold for $21.3 million. There are four surviving original copies of the original 1215 document known to still exist. One of these, held at Lincoln Cathedral in England, was actually sent to Fort Knox for safe keeping during the Second World War. If one of the 1215 copies was put up for sale, a roomful of Da Vinci's finest would probably not be sufficient to cover the expected auction value. If an original document sealed by King John were in existence, it would doubtless fetch a great deal more. This, however, is nothing, of course, next to the Magna Carta's real value as an inspiration and a symbol for those who fight for rights and freedoms.

But now we come to the worrying part. For a start, there's the shame that so many of the important rights or freedoms contained in the Magna Carta or developed thereafter in the tradition of the Magna Carta, have since been compromised, forgotten about, diluted or simply taken away.

Clause 38 stated that no-one could be put on trial based solely on the unsupported word of an official. It meant the state could not punish or imprison you based solely on the testimony of its own officials and own police officers, who have obvious vested interests in supporting the cases brought forward by their own employer. How many people have been fitted up by police for a crime they didn't commit since this clause was repealed?

The repealed Clause 40 disallowed the selling of justice, or its denial or delay. Yet, how many people today are denied justice because they can't afford the legal fees that would be required to get justice? Should we really have laws that are only accessible to very rich people?

And then, there's the problem of ignorance. The fact that most school-leavers would not have a clue what someone was talking about if they mentioned the Magna Carta, is very worrying and a sign of a desperately impoverished education system. I wouldn't worry about it much, though, if these school-leavers knew and understood the important principles and values that were developed upon the foundation of the Magna Carta - but, most often, they don't! And when people no longer take an interest in the rights and principles that underpin the operation of a fair and decent society, it may not be long before they're no longer living in a fair and decent society.

The film, 'Equilibrium,' depicts a future society in which the government forces everyone to take drugs which suppress their emotions. Music, paintings, books and other works of art are banned in case they provoke an emotional response - and anyone caught in possession of such things is usually executed. Such measures are designed to keep the people compliant, so that government can exert almost total control over the population. It doesn't want people to live as thinking, feeling human beings - it just wants to use them as slaves.

Minority Report (a short story and a film) depicts a society in which 'criminals' are convicted, sentenced and imprisoned before they've even committed any crime - on the basis that it has been predicted that they will soon commit a crime if they are not prevented from doing so. Traditional ideas of justice have been abandoned in order to provide people with 'protection' from a perceived threat that may or may not be as real as is supposed.

These are just two examples out of many notable books or films that depict a dystopian society. Whereas a 'utopian' society is a sort of ideal society in which everything is good, a 'dystopian' society is one where things, at least in some ways, have gone very badly wrong.

Dystopian depictions of the future play a key role in debates about freedom. They each offer a nightmare vision of how things might turn out if we allow our society to head down the wrong path. This wrong path almost always involves important rights and freedoms being diminished or abolished entirely. Such depictions are used to highlight the importance of our freedoms and warn us of the dangers of failing to protect them when they are threatened.

Amongst the most frequently referenced dystopian visions of all are 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell and 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley - both highly influential, nightmarish depictions of states using extreme, but very different, methods to enslave their populations - and I'll be looking at these in more detail later on.

Dystopian visions aren't all doom and gloom, however. One of my favourite examples, 'Robocop' - the iconic film by Paul Verhoeven - depicts a predominately nightmarish future dominated by corporate greed. Human beings have become mere tools in the game of corporate profits. They are treated more like machines than people.

Robocop himself is more literally a machine - he is a 'cyborg' supercop created by combining a human brain and nervous system with the latest robotic technology. The good news, however, is that, even in his case, his human side - his basic humanity - has not gone away completely. It has not been destroyed and refuses to die, despite the efforts of the corporation that created him. Robocop becomes a force of resistance against the corporate machine that created him.

From 1922 to 1991, Russia was a part of the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' (the USSR) - or 'Soviet Union' for short. The Soviet system of government was developed under the paranoid dictator, Joseph Stalin - a man who killed millions in his ruthless quest to cling on to power and to exterminate anyone he thought might threaten his position. His legacy continued long after his death, and if you were a Soviet citizen up until the 1980s, then you may well have lived your life in fear of Russia's secret police; the dreaded KGB.

At any time, you could be stopped in the streets by a KGB officer who might very well ask to see your papers. (Alternatively, there might be a knock on your door.) You would have to show your identity documents and any permits you ought to have relating to where you lived or worked, for example. You would have to explain yourself to this KGB officer - explain why you were where you were, tell him where you'd been, where you were going and why. You would have to answer any other questions he asked you. If he was not satisfied with your answers, then you might be taken away for further questioning.

It wasn't so much criminals the KGB were concerned with, but 'dissidents' - essentially anyone who was prepared to criticise anything the government or the KGB did or said. If you were suspected of being a dissident, you might be interrogated (perhaps tortured) and might eventually be sent to a prison or labour camp. You might 'disappear' and never be seen again.

The government of Nazi Germany was obviously even more extreme. In the Nazis' short-lived empire, it was essentially down to the Nazi leadership to decide who would live and who would be murdered. You might be killed for such simple 'crimes' as having Jewish friends - or, perhaps, just because a Nazi soldier took a dislike to your face.

Of course, not many governments are quite so extreme as the Nazis', but history is crowded with murderous dictators and evil regimes intent upon suppressing freedoms and crushing opposition through whatever means they deemed necessary.

Time and again, throughout history, there are people who thirst for power over other people. They will happily deprive other people of their freedoms in order to satisfy their personal ambitions. They may want to force people to obey them. They may want to conquer new territories. They may want to imprison or kill those who oppose them.

Sometimes, it isn't a particular individual who wants to grab power in this way. Sometimes, it is a group of individuals. Sometimes, it is an ethnic group or a religious group. Sometimes it is the members of a particular political party. Sometimes it is the very people who make up the machinery of the state - the civil servants who work in government departments - who continually press to have ever more control and power over ordinary people. They want to continually enlarge their role so that they can justify bigger budgets, more staff and bigger bonuses.

Every single country in the world faces continual threats from people in power who want to take away people's important freedoms.

It has often been the job of intellectuals to warn us against the dangers of a power-hungry state. They are there to warn us of the consequences of not acting in time. They are there to point out the dire future that will lie ahead of us if we do not stand up to defend our rights and freedoms. When societies do not listen to these intellectuals, they end up with a brutal governing regime, such as those of Hitler or Stalin or the Taliban.

Would you care if the government wanted to take away your freedoms and dictate to you where you can live, where you can work, who you can meet with and talk to, what you can say and what you are allowed to think? You should do - and George Orwell certainly did.

George Orwell was an English writer who lived from 1903 to 1950. He was actually born in India (part of the British Empire at the time), but grew up in England. Besides being a writer, he spent periods serving as a policeman in Burma, working as a teacher in England and fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot through the throat during the Spanish Civil war, with the bullet only narrowly missing his main artery.

George Orwell wrote many things. During his lifetime, he was probably best known for his journalism and his non-fiction books, such as, 'The Road to Wigan Pier.' Nowadays, however, Orwell is best known for his novels, 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' These novels, in particular, continue to be enormously influential. Ideas, terms and phrases from these books remain central to intelligent debates about such things as state control, political-repression and freedom itself. His terms and names, such as 'Big Brother' for example, now form key parts of the English language, even for people who have never read his books and have little or no idea who he was.

George Orwell has been and continues to be enormously influential. It is George Orwell who is responsible for many of the important terms that we use to describe the methods of the totalitarian (all-powerful) state as it builds its empire of control and repression. It is vitally important that you know what 'Orwellian' means, what 'Big Brother' really refers to (other than a TV programme), that you know the significance of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' that you know what 'double-think' is and that you know about 'Room 101,' 'newspeak,' 'thoughtcrime' and 'the thought-police.' These are the words and concepts that freedom campaigners use to communicate with each other - as such, they are key weapons in the fight to defend ourselves against the grasping hands of overbearing state-control.

Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are novels about freedom and about states who want to take it away from us.

In Animal Farm, a farmer mistreats his animals. The animals dream of a better future. They overthrow the farmer and try to set up a fairer society, but they end up being ruled and mistreated by the pigs instead, who have become their new masters.

The story reflects what happened in the real world, in countries such as Russia, where communist governments that were supposed to be looking after the interests of their people, ended up using brutal methods to control and enslave their population instead.

Animal Farm is a study of corruption in the quest for power. Everyone in the new society was supposed to be treated fairly. Everyone was supposed to be equal, but some ended up 'more equal than others.' When people are given the power to make decisions on behalf of others, they often end up, instead, making decisions in their own interests, in pursuit of more power or simply as part of a desperate bid to hold on to power for as long as they possibly can.

Leaders almost always claim they need more powers in order to do their jobs - but this extra power often involves them taking freedoms away from ordinary people, and when freedom is taken away, even supposedly for the common good, things are pretty much bound to turn out rather badly.

Very often, the more power leaders are allowed, the more power-hungry they become. Having power seems to go to their heads and they end up making outrageous claims that people's basic freedoms must be taken away for the benefit of society.

We see the patterns in Animal Farm reflected all the time in the behaviour of many of our own politicians today. They gain power saying they are going to do all sorts of good things for the benefit of society. Sometimes, believe it or not, some of them actually started off wanting to achieve good things. When they gain power, however, instead of using that power to do good, they become obsessed with holding on to power. The power becomes like a drug. They demand ever more power, even though they are failing to do any good with the power they have and even though they've completely lost track of what it was they were supposed to be achieving with all that power.

The famous phrase, 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' was actually written by Lord Acton in 1887, but it is a phrase strongly associated with George Orwell because it neatly encompasses one of the central themes of his work.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is Orwell's most influential work. It depicts a dystopian vision of the future in which the state treats people essentially as slaves and subjects them to rigorous control in all aspects of their lives. It has the population under tight surveillance and comes down hard on anyone who so much as expresses doubts about the way the country is being run.

In the novel, it is not entirely clear whether 'Big Brother' is a real person. Perhaps he is the dictator in charge of the whole society, or perhaps he is merely a propaganda figure invented by the ruling party. The important thing is that 'Big Brother' is a character who represents the state.

'Big Brother' suggests a sort of protective friend - a sort of older brother who is watching you, but only for your own protection - and that is how the state likes to present itself. In reality, Big Brother is really the all-powerful state that seeks, not to protect you, but to control you, take away almost all your freedoms and thus effectively enslave you.

This, of course, reflects the way powerful states often behave today. Whenever they want to reduce our freedoms, they present their new policies as ways of protecting us. For example, some governments give, or want to give police officers 'stop and account' powers. This would mean that police officers can stop ordinary citizens in the street and demand that they explain where they've been, where they're going and what they are up to. These new powers are presented, by the state, as necessary in order to 'protect' us from criminals and terrorists.

Again, our governments want to spy on us. They want CCTV almost everywhere. They want to be able to keep records of which internet sites you visit and of who you phone, text or e-mail. We now live in the surveillance society, but it's all for our own benefit - or so we're repeatedly told!

When governments try to introduce new ways of monitoring us and controlling us, wise people say, "Look out! It's Big Brother!" They're warning us to reject these intrusive government policies unless we want to end up with the sort of evil, totalitarian state depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Big Brother state in the novel is a brutal regime, prepared to use torture and violence. One place you might receive particularly brutal torture is 'Room 101' in the 'Ministry of Love.' But, the Big Brother state doesn't rely on violence alone. It doesn't only exert control through surveillance and force. It also has an extensive propaganda system that effectively keeps most of the population brainwashed and subservient.

As brutal regimes throughout history have found, it is extremely difficult to force everyone to obey you. It is very difficult for a brutal regime to survive for long if it can't find a way to persuade most of the population to be willing accomplices in their own slavery. Propaganda is a form of communication that is specifically designed to favour one side of an argument or debate. In the Big Brother state - as in many real-world situations - the government controls the major sources of news. It uses this control to feed people lies and half-truths and thus help to convince people to support - or, at least, not to oppose - the government.

As part of its propaganda system, the Big Brother state in the novel is constantly having history rewritten so that the 'facts' fit better with the government's own beliefs and political agenda. In the novel, old newspaper articles and the like are literally re-written in order to fit in with the 'facts' that best suit the government. In many real world situations, the original articles may not be so directly changed, but the 'facts' as people perceive them gradually change over time as a result of the government and the media telling lies or simply being selective about the information that they choose to highlight.

There are many terms - either taken or derived from Orwell's work - that are used in relation to propaganda campaigns in the real world. For example, when a government or political party tells lies, it often ends up contradicting itself. When it asks us to believe its contradictory lies, it is asking us to engage in 'double-think.' Only by being able to believe various contradictory things, would we be able to deny to ourselves that they are lying to us.

An 'unperson' is someone whose existence is no longer convenient for a ruling regime to acknowledge. Not only might they have been killed by the regime, but their very existence is denied and erased from historical records. At the same time, however, in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' it is a crime to mention an unperson's name or refer to their existence.

This, of course, requires doublethink by those acting on behalf of the regime. They must believe (or, at least, act as if they believe) the person never existed. At the same time, however, they know the person did exist - otherwise they wouldn't know to arrest people who mention the unperson's name.

There are many 'unpersons' in the real world. When people fall out of favour with a brutal dictator, it may be forbidden to ever mention their names again. People who do so may risk severe penalties. Even in more liberal societies, there are less brutal, but still rather disturbing methods used to ignore the existence of people that politicians and others might prefer to forget. Any mention of the person is simply omitted from all speeches and leaflets. We might not attempt to doctor old newspapers, but we can easily remove references to these people and these newspaper articles from our websites. The Wikipedia page can be edited by an accomplice to downplay someone's role in past events or to cast aspersions upon their character. Sometimes people are even 'photoshopped' out of publicity photographs.

'Newspeak' in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is a new language created and endorsed by the government. This language was a restricted version of English, designed to assist the regime in its task of controlling and brainwashing the population. The basic idea is that you can influence people by restricting the language that they are allowed to use.

Newspeak is a version of English in which many important words have been removed. Words which are deemed threatening to the regime are eliminated from the language. Thus, it becomes difficult to discuss certain subjects when the words you might use in your discussion are no longer allowed or no longer even known about. For example, newspeak makes it difficult to discuss freedom, because there is no longer a word for it. The word freedom is no longer in use - no longer allowed to be used, and, eventually, forgotten about.

A sort of 'newspeak' is in use today. Just like in the novel, we are restricted - both by the law and by social pressure in the form of political-correctness - in terms of the words we are allowed to use. Certain words that used to be in common usage, are no longer allowed. These might be words deemed to be offensive - or merely words deemed to be 'inappropriate.'

The government and the forces of political correctness have restricted the use of certain words. It might be hoped, for example, that our society might become less racist if we are no longer allowed to use 'racist words.' The idea is to modify our attitudes through modifying our speech. Of course, opposing racism seems like a good cause, but does it justify techniques bordering on brainwashing?

Isn't the ethical way to oppose racism simply to make a rational case arguing against it - highlighting the harm it causes and pointing out the illogical arguments and immoral motivations that lead to racism in the first place? Do we really need to resort to draconian restrictions on what words people are allowed to use?

And such techniques are not restricted to opposing racism. Take, for example, the debate about gay marriage. A number of countries allow homosexuals to engage in 'civil partnerships' which give them the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples. 'Marriage,' however, is a term that has, for thousands of years, referred exclusively to heterosexual relationships.

Some people aren't happy with this situation. Civil partners may have the same legal rights as married heterosexuals, but some campaigners want more than this. They want to change the way people think about homosexual relationships. To this end, they want to change the language we use, so that heterosexual and homosexual partnerships can both be referred to as marriage. Then, when people describe someone as 'married,' that no longer tells us whether they are heterosexual or homosexual.

Is this a reasonable step to discourage discrimination - or is there a danger in manipulating language in this way to try to change the way people view such things. By insisting that we refer to gay partnerships as marriage, some campaigners are trying to eliminate any distinction in our minds between heterosexual marriage and gay partnerships. Is this a legitimate tactic or is it manipulation of language verging on brainwashing? If there is a disagreement over the rights and wrongs of homosexual relationships, isn't logical and rational argument, not the manipulation of language, the best way to deal with it? 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' suggests we ought to at least stop to ask these important questions.

Of course, people have always manipulated language for political or propaganda reasons, but choosing your own words to present your case in a positive light is one thing, banning other people from using words you don't like is something much more serious and draconian altogether.

Even worse than making it a crime to say certain things, is making it a crime to even think certain things. 'Crimethink' in the novel is more commonly referred to today as 'thoughtcrime.' The 'thought police' in the real world, want to punish you for so much as thinking of certain things or holding certain opinions that they don't happen to approve of.

You might think that we haven't - thankfully - yet reached the stage where thoughts can be crimes, but don't be so sure! For example, even in some supposedly liberal countries, certain forms of pornographic cartoon are illegal. Why? No real people need to be violated or harmed or abused in order to create a cartoon. They're not pictures of real things - they're just drawings taken out of someone's imagination. Yet the government bans such images anyway. So why do they ban them? Isn't the truth simply that the government doesn't like what people might be thinking when they view such material? Thinking about certain sexual things has become a thoughtcrime.

Under basic principles of liberty and freedom, the government is not supposed to restrict what people can do and say except to prevent them harming others in some way. Restricting what pictures people can look at, when there is no evidence that viewing such pictures causes anyone else any harm, is a patently fascist policy, but one which attracts hardly any protests at all - and that ought to seriously worry us all.

George Orwell has become one of the most influential writers of all time - and he used his influence to help stand up for our freedoms. When the government threatens to take away your freedom, you have George Orwell to thank for standing up against them.

Every time the state attempts to unreasonably subjugate people to its will, the work of George Orwell is invariably referenced to stand up against them. His words and terms enhance our language and enable us to communicate more effectively about great issues of freedom and justice.

If Orwell portrayed an horrific future for mankind in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' then Aldous Huxley, in his 1932 book, 'Brave New World,' portrayed a future of pleasure and satisfaction - but one that, in its way, was even more frightening and horrific than Orwell's.

Brave New World is, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the world's best-known dystopian visions of the future. It presents a possible future in which there have been great scientific and technological advances. These advances have produced a seemingly prosperous society. This future, however, is one in which the freedom of the individual, including the freedom to be an individual, has been largely lost.

It is a future in which the state decides for you what your role in life will be - and that decision is made before you are even born. Advanced biological techniques allow people to be produced using an essentially industrial-like process - and each is conditioned and brainwashed to fulfil their role in life as chosen by the state. The idea is that each individual has a place in society - one that is predetermined, set, fixed and unchangeable.

The society in Brave New World follows the ideals of what they refer to as 'Fordism' - named after the founder of the Ford motor company. Essentially they have come to see the running of human society as if it were some sort of industrial process that merely needs to be run efficiently - just as in Ford's factories.

The highly-organised state-controlled economy is very efficient and effective in many ways. The society is one in which many people see the benefits of such a highly-orchestrated society. Ultimately, however, the book highlights the terrible price society must pay for such apparent 'efficiency.'

The problem is not that people are unhappy - since the vast majority have been successfully conditioned to be happy with the roles they have been given. Something, however, is obviously missing. That missing something is freedom - and the book asks us to question the idea that loss of freedom is a price worth paying in order to achieve the order, apparent efficiency and material prosperity we often crave. Isn't life about much more than merely fulfilling our functions as part of a huge industrial machine?

It might seen abhorrent to some of us, but it is true that many people do seem happiest when they know their place and when decisions about their lives are made for them so that they don't have to face up to the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.

Huxley's dystopia differs greatly from Orwell's visions. Orwell envisages a nasty state that controls people through fear, torture, murder and tight control of people's lives. In Huxley's dystopia, there is no similarly threatening and violent state. This seems better and more pleasant - but, in a way, it is much more worrying.

The population in Brave New World are, in many ways, just as much slaves as the population in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's just that they've been bribed rather than threatened. In accepting these bribes, they become willingly acquiescent in the terrible scheme that destroys any chance of them being living, thinking, free people.

All this means Huxley's dystopia is much more sustainable and therefore a more realistic threat. The Orwellian Big Brother state couldn't last in reality, just like Hitler's couldn't, because it relies too much on coercion, violence and repression. It would stir up too much resistance - and would almost inevitably crumble away.

In Brave New World, ordinary workers have basically been intellectually disabled (chemically) before 'birth' to be content with the menial tasks they perform. People are happy in many ways. They have so much - so much material wealth and so many pleasures - but they're conditioned to be so stupid that they don't even realise they've lost almost everything that's actually important.

In Orwell's dystopia, the Big Brother state made expensive use of the stick. Huxley, on the other hand, showed that the carrot can be far more dangerous and damaging than the stick.

Whereas Orwell warned us of a terrible future if we sacrificed our freedoms, Huxley warned that, even if we did gain material advantages, our loss of freedom would not be worth it. He also warned that we might be too stupid and too passive to realise how important our lost freedoms were.

'Fahrenheit 451' is a famous dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. It depicts a dystopia in which books are illegal. If anyone is found with books, not only are the books burned, but so is the entire house in which they are found. The title of the book apparently refers to the temperature at which the paper used in books will spontaneously catch fire.

Fahrenheit 451 is often used as a key reference when people wish to point out the very strong link between censorship and fascist regimes. When books, music, films, images or web content are banned or restricted, that's censorship - people are being restricted in terms of what they are allowed to see and hear. In extreme cases, books are burned and people are sent to prison simply for reading books or viewing images that the government doesn't want them to see. By controlling what people can see and hear, fascist regimes hope to be able to control how people think and act, thus making them more like the compliant slaves they wish them to be.

Censorship also restricts how people can express themselves and the ideas that they are allowed to express. Fascism and the denial of freedom of expression are inextricably linked. Fascist regimes seek to repress all sorts of views that they deem to be incompatible with the doctrines they seek to promote. Perhaps most of all, however, they want to ban criticism of their policies and their leaders.

The world still has many brutal dictators and regimes who will happily kill or imprison people for criticising the government. Even in modern, seemingly democratic countries, where criticising the government remains a popular pastime, there is still often a temptation for the government to seek popularity by censoring unpopular words or images. In doing so, however, they downgrade free expression from a principle to a mere slogan of convenience. They support free expression - but only in circumstances where it is popular to do so. The minute there are votes to be gained by banning something, they're scouting around for fig leaf excuses as to why principles of free expression shouldn't apply in those particular circumstances. Someone's been offended, so free speech is further undermined as new things are added to the long list of things you are no longer allowed to produce, see or hear.

This is how the censorship started in Fahrenheit 451. The government didn't have to impose censorship through force. It merely exploited the situation when various minority groups took offence over what some books contained. This is exactly the sort of thing we see today when, for example, religious groups or campaigners against homophobia demand that certain views should be banned by law and people found expressing them should be severely punished. Governments see votes in backing such demands - and in doing so, they abandon the free speech principles that underpin decent and civilised societies.

By defending free speech and free expression, we also defend ourselves from fascism. Through failure to defend our free speech and freedom of expression, we abandon our key defences against fascism and we open the doors for our other freedoms and perhaps, eventually, even our very lives to be taken away from us.

'The Matrix' is a very well-known film, considered by some to be a modern classic - and by most others to be, at least, highly influential. You've probably seen it.

The film is perhaps best known for its innovative special effects, especially its famous 'bullet-time' effects in which the camera appears to spin around an actor as the action is portrayed in slow-motion. Perhaps partly because of the slickness of these special effects, the key ideas within the film are often somewhat overlooked. They were hardly original ideas - they were built upon long-standing science-fiction traditions - but they remain, nevertheless, very important ideas.

The Matrix portrays a dystopian future in which mankind is enslaved by machines, but it is not about a dystopian future in which man is enslaved by machines. The world as portrayed in the film is, of course, a metaphor for some of the problems we face here and now in our own society. The film is asking us questions, not about the future, but about the dysfunctional nature of the real world we live in today.

In the film, humans are each housed in their own small cocoon-like structure and used essentially as batteries. Their internal chemistry is used to generate electricity that is needed to power the machines that are mankind's new overlords. In order to keep them alive and passive, these humans are plugged into a sort of virtual-reality computer programme that makes them believe they are living normal lives as people lived them at the end of the 20th century. This false reality is known as, 'The Matrix.'

Thus, humans live their lives in a sort of computer-generated fake reality that keeps them from knowing the truth about what is really going on in the world. This means they can then live as electricity-producing slaves to the machines that now rule the world. They are deceived and this deception allows them to unresistingly be used as mere components in a vast machine serving their masters and overlords.

The film, as I said, is not about a dystopian future - it is about the reality of life today. We may not have computer overlords, but haven't people been largely reduced to mere components in an economic machine? Aren't the rulers of our society - both politicians and those in charge of large corporations - just using us for their own ends? Aren't we constantly fed false realities in order to keep us quiet and to prevent us being free?

The point is that perhaps we are living in a sort of Matrix right now. Our version of reality is a distorted version of reality fed to us through the media and spread through social and peer-group pressure.

So, what are the false realities that we are being fed? People are conditioned, for example, to believe that happiness and worth is about earning and spending lots of money. They are conditioned to believe in the consumer dream - that to be happy you must own a nice house, drive an expensive car, go on expensive holidays, have cable or satellite TV, have an expensive phone, drink lots of alcohol and eat in expensive restaurants. This is the false reality that is constantly marketed and advertised to us.

But in the 'real world' these things don't matter so much. In the real world what matters are such things as family, friendship, good health, kindness and thoughtfulness - precisely the sorts of things that people are brainwashed to neglect or disparage.

The real world can be a harsh place because many people are often selfish, greedy and unkind. The fight for decency, freedom and justice is tough, but that's not a good reason to give up and allow ourselves to be distracted by consumerism. Just as in the film, the path to a better world is difficult, but it's still very much a path worth taking - partly because of all the difficulties and challenges that face us along the way.

There will, I hope, be few people who have not heard of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. King Arthur was, of course, a legendary king of England. He may have been based on a real person - or perhaps more than one. Some of the King Arthur stories may have had some basis in real events - although they have almost certainly been altered and exaggerated over time.

Perhaps the stories are almost entirely fictional. In a sense, it doesn't really matter. What's important about the stories is that the heroes they describe - King Arthur and his knights - were motivated by a very special set of values. They followed a code of chivalry - a set of rules about how a decent and honourable person should behave.

In one well-known Arthurian story ('The Ugly Wife'), King Arthur rides out, in traditional fashion, to help a lady in distress - not for money or lands, but simply to help someone who needs his help. He walks into a trap and is forced on pain of death to make a promise. He keeps his promise, even though it was a promise made under duress to his enemy and one which will probably result in his death.

Arthur's nephew, in order to save his King, makes a promise to a woman who is able to help save Arthur. He promises to marry the woman - and he sticks with his promise even though she is extraordinarily ugly and has the most ridiculously foul table-manners.

All turns out well in the end - but both Arthur and his nephew, Gwain, repeatedly demonstrated their determination to behave honourably, to stick to their word and to keep their promises even when it clearly seemed against their best interests to do so.

In the Arthurian legends, being 'great' wasn't about money or fame or power or fast cars - or even fast horses! Being heroic was all about being honourable, decent, kind, considerate, brave and intelligent. Being 'successful' wasn't about having great wealth for yourself - it was about what you did for other people.

Such values are so very different from those of the world today. We all ought to know that there are things far more important than money and fame, but so many people today have been brainwashed into believing otherwise and behaving accordingly.

Charles Dickens remains very famous. Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations are amongst his most well-known works. Dickens was a storyteller, he was an entertainer, but his legacy is also largely a result of something other than how entertaining his stories were.

Many famous writers from hundreds of years ago wrote about the lives of the rich or, at least, the relatively rich. 'Pride and Prejudice' is the classic example. Though they might be fussing over marrying someone rich so that they won't be 'ruined,' the people in the story (other than very minor servant characters) were all immensely rich compared to the average person of the time.

It is certainly understandable that the generally well-off people who had the education and the time to write stories and novels would write about the society they were part of. They would write about the sort of life they knew, rather than the lives of ordinary peasants.

Dickens, however, was different. He did sometimes write about some rather well-off people, but his stories contained many detailed portrayals of poor characters; peasants, criminals, down-and-outs, the homeless and the wretched.

The Victorian period in which Dickens lived was one that is well known for two rather contrasting reasons. There were two very different sides to Victorian life. It was undoubtedly a period of great advances in many ways. Huge and ambitious construction projects were undertaken; railways, bridges, ships. Great wealth was being accumulated. Technology and society were advancing at a great pace.

At the same time, however, Victorian society was often a very harsh society if you were poor - and in the stories that Dickens wrote, he repeatedly demonstrated that he wasn't afraid to look at the darker side of Victorian life.

One of the rather harsh attitudes, apparently fairly common in Victorian society, was that the poor somehow deserved to be poor - that they were at fault in some way for their plight. Others might not have entirely agreed with such a position, but they may nevertheless have agreed that it was still the responsibility of the poor to deal with their poverty through their own means, rather than through relying on any sort of 'handouts' from anyone else.

Such attitudes were reflected by the existence and prevalence of that now notorious Victorian institution; the workhouse. In Victorian society, people who could not support themselves were often forced to enter a workhouse. These might include unemployed adults, but would also include orphaned or abandoned children and destitute old people. The ideal was that people in workhouses would be given work to do and given food and shelter and other essentials in return. Where possible, they were to be encouraged and enabled to work their way out of their predicament. This was seen as a superior solution to simply giving people handouts - which, it was feared, might encourage idleness. In reality, however, the inmates of workhouses were often treated virtually as slaves and were exploited more than helped.

The conditions in many workhouses were notoriously bad and the people who lived in them were sometimes treated so badly that being forced into a workhouse was often seen as worse than being allowed to starve to death in the streets.

Charles Dickens was key to the effort to draw our society's attentions to the desperate problems of poverty. He wanted to stir people into doing something about them, so that our society would no longer accept people starving to death in the streets or children being treated as slave labour in workhouses.

He made it more difficult for people to turn a blind eye to the wide-ranging reasons why people fell into poverty or to the way they were treated afterwards.

He challenged popular Victorian attitudes and championed the development of a more caring, more compassionate society that recognised that we all share a measure of responsibility for severe poverty and all ought to pull our weight to do something about it.

Dickens was also, in a sense, a champion of freedom. Freedom from poverty is itself a very important form of freedom. Freedom is not about wealth, but it is often connected to wealth. It is not that the rich are necessarily free, but being desperately poor does drastically restrict your freedoms. By tackling the problems of poverty, we are also championing important freedoms. By neglecting the problems of poverty, we undermine the cause of freedom.

Charles Dickens' stories remain well-known today for their entertainment value, but they also continue to be used as important reference points for discussing the lack of compassion that was often evident in Victorian society and which we often see re-emerging in our modern society.

Dickens was particularly associated with his depictions of the darker side of Victorian life, so when something is described as 'Dickensian,' it is the darker side of the society he portrayed that is usually being referred to.

'Dickensian' is often used to refer to things that would have fitted in with the often harsh attitudes of the Victorian era. If a hospital is described as Dickensian, then it is probably being compared to a drab and cruel Victorian institution, such as a workhouse. If a novel is described as Dickensian, it might well be a story of poverty and destitution or about people in some other way down on their luck, in need and generally being treated badly by an oftentimes uncaring society.

When a government policy is described as 'Dickensian,' that's usually a warning that it may be reflective of uncaring attitudes and a general lack of compassion from wealthy, well-off people towards those much less fortunate than themselves - the sorts of things that Charles Dickens worked hard to expose and discourage.

In our modern world, trying to get things done can often involve a great deal of bureaucracy - there are rules and regulations to comply with, forms to be filled in, other paperwork to be completed, permissions to be sought and licences to be applied for. Then there are all the administrators and inspectors and officials who oversee the rules and regulations, procedures and paperwork - and they've got checks to do, agendas to compile and committee meetings to organise and attend.

This level of 'bureaucracy' is a relatively modern phenomenon. Of course, bureaucracy has existed in small amounts for thousands of years. Village elders had to be consulted, kings sealed their orders and despatched their commands, but in recent decades bureaucracy has grown exponentially and has come to dominate our lives like never before. The levels of bureaucracy in our modern societies have grown to such an extent that people often feel as if they are surrounded or even trapped by bureaucratic obstacles.

Almost all modern societies are riddled with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy so dominates our lives that many people never really stop to think how big an effect it has. They've never known any other way of life - not as adults, anyway.

Bureaucracy drastically restricts your options in life. Rules, regulations and procedures must be gone through to get things done. Administrators must be satisfied before they will give their permission for your intended actions.

Your freedom is severely restricted by bureaucracy. So much of what you might have done in life, you don't. Sometimes, the rules and regulations might allow it, but the bureaucracy involved means so much expense, takes up so much time and causes so much hassle, that it's no longer worth you going ahead with whatever it was you wanted to do. Sometimes, the rules and regulations just don't allow it at all. Sometimes, even when they do, some stuck-up officials decide to deny you the permissions you need anyway.

So much of your freedom is missing because we live in a society in which officials and administrators are allowed to interfere in almost all aspects of our lives and dictate to us what we are and are not allowed to do with our lives. We might be used to it, but that doesn't make it right.

'Yes Minister' was a highly-acclaimed British 'situation comedy' series made in the 1980s. Whilst brilliantly funny, it also had a very serious message at its heart - a message telling the truth about how governments are often run.

The series follow the exploits of Jim Hacker, a minister in the UK government. In theory, he is the minister in charge of a large government department and he has a large number of civil servants (the public officials employed by the state) who are supposed to help him carry out his policies.

In each episode, Jim Hacker normally has a genuinely good idea or policy that he wishes to promote, but he almost never seems to ever really achieve anything, because the civil servants who are supposed to be helping him, are actually busy being obstructive. The chief architect of this obstructive behaviour is the Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby - the senior civil servant of Hacker's own department.

The chief reason the civil service obstructs the minister's plans is that they are busy doing what is in the interests of the civil service rather than what is in the interests of the nation.

The most common issue of contention occurs when the minister wants to make some sort of efficiency improvement. He wants to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, reduce unnecessary expenditure and cut waste. These policies are usually perfectly sensible, but usually involve the loss of civil service jobs, the loss of some of the privileges that senior civil servants enjoy or the exposure of civil service inefficiency or incompetence.

Sir Humphrey Appleby generally manages to use various devious methods to prevent the minister putting his policies into practice. He invents reasons why the policy would be difficult or impossible or costly. He holds back important information from the minister or drowns him in irrelevant information. He convinces the minister that the policy would be bad for the government's popularity or bad for the minister's career. Essentially, he bribes and blackmails and deceives the minister into following his advice - and this generally means abandoning any policies which would reduce in size the huge, costly, bureaucratic machinery of the state.

The minister himself is well-meaning - he wants to make the country a better place. The trouble is that he is also a weak man. Whatever principles he says he has, are always sacrificed whenever standing up for those principles would appear to jeopardise his own career.

So, whilst, officially, the democratically elected and appointed minister is in charge of the department, the reality is that he usually ends up doing whatever the civil service wants him to do. This, of course, is profoundly anti-democratic. The country is being controlled, not by the elected politicians - who we, the public, can fire if we don't think they are doing a good job - but by faceless, unelected, unaccountable civil servants controlling things behind the scenes. If this is really how government works, then the claim that we live in a democracy is a lie.

The series spoke so many uncomfortable truths. Of course, there were exaggerations for comic effect, but the fundamental message was absolutely true. Politicians end up being controlled by the machinery of the state and, far too often, the machinery of the state is utterly self-absorbed and self-serving.

Other supposedly democratic countries have slightly different systems of government - but most, if not all of them, frequently suffer from exactly the same problem. The machinery of state looks after its own interests rather than the interests of the nation and the people.

The sitcom continues to be referenced today when embarrassing cock-ups and failures are revealed in government. 'It's just like something out of Yes Minister,' people might say. A weak government minister or Secretary of State might be derided as being no more competent than Jim Hacker. A manipulative advisor might be referred to as 'a sort of Sir Humphrey Appleby figure.'

Despite the enormous and continuing popularity of the series and its continuing influence on our culture, too often today, it is as if the obvious lessons highlighted by this series have been largely forgotten. It is as if politicians no longer realise that the farcical goings on in the series are very, very similar to what happens in real life. Ministers so often end up being controlled by the bureaucrats in their departments rather than the other way around. The fact that the politicians often think they are genuinely in charge is just part of the genius of the scheme.

The series suggest that the illusion of democratic control is just that - an illusion. This, of course, is one of the key reasons why governments so consistently fail to achieve what they promised to achieve during the election campaign. Yes, sometimes they were just lying in the first place. Very often, though, they do mean to implement some good policies, but they are deceived and manipulated into dropping them, watering them down or using such enormous bureaucracy to implement them that no cost savings or net benefits are ever realised.

And think: No matter what politicians say and promise during their election campaigns, their policies in government vary remarkably little. They almost always act to preserve the vast machinery of the state. Many say they will cut government spending, but how many actually achieve this? They say they will cut bureaucracy - but how often does this actually happen?

Indeed, how often do bureaucracy-cutting measures end up actually increasing the bureaucracy we have to face? Administrators and accountants are appointed, at great expense, to find ways of reducing bureaucracy and improving the efficiency of government departments. Very often, the schemes they propose are not only costly to implement, but so woefully ineffective that we often end up with a more complex and expensive administrative system than we started with.

Fairly obviously, public officials are looking out for their own interests and are often prepared to obstruct, as far as they can, any policies that might adversely affect their own pay, conditions and status. The officials in government departments fight to secure the biggest budget they can get. They rarely have any significant incentive to slim themselves down and be more efficient. They continually fight to impose more bureaucracy and to have more things to regulate and control, because that gives them an excuse to demand bigger budgets and because they have a fundamental craving for status, power and control.

Yes Minister has even been compared to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in terms of the way it encourages people to see the state as a potentially menacing, self-interested machine of control and repression. In some ways, though, Yes Minister is even scarier than the brutal dystopia of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' - not because it is brutal, but because it is far more realistic. This is actually how people are manipulated and controlled - this is the reality!

It's not saying, 'Beware - in the future, there may be no democracy.' It's saying ' Wake up! - There is no real democracy now.' We don't have genuine democracy. We don't live in a democracy; we live in a bureaucracy where the interests of the bureaucratic machine come far above the interests of ordinary people.

Sometimes, a sort of bureaucratic madness seems to exist when rules no longer appear to have any connection with common sense or reasonableness and when they take on a life of their own, with no obvious connection with the reasons the rules were created in the first place.

'Catch-22' by Joseph Heller is a famous book that highlights the sort of absurd bureaucratic nightmares that people sometimes get caught up in. It highlights the madness of the bureaucratic mentality in which the bureaucratic system continues to adhere to and enforce rules and procedures even when doing to has long ceased to make any sort of rational sense. The bureaucratic mentality prevents sanity from prevailing by allowing bureaucratic procedures to override what ought to be common sense.

A 'Catch-22' situation is one where bureaucratic rules combine to prevent a sane solution to a problem being applied. More specifically, the phrase is used to describe a sort of circular set of rules that leaves us with no way out of the mess we find ourselves in.

There are many 'Catch-22' situations described in the book, but it might be more instructive to consider some Catch 22 situations from real life.

For example, unemployment and homelessness are serious problems. As a society, we ought to be taking action to deal with these problems. However, unemployed homeless people often find themselves in a Catch-22 situation.

Landlords will often refuse to rent accommodation to an unemployed person. They may be worried about whether they'll get paid their rent money. They may have concerns about whether unemployed people might be more likely than others to be troublesome tenants.

At the same time, many potential employers will not employ a homeless person. Having no address causes administrative difficulties and employers may have concerns about what problems homeless people might have that may have caused them to be homeless in the first place.

Consequently, many homeless and unemployed people find themselves in a situation where they can't rent somewhere to live unless they have a job, but no-one will give them a job if they don't have somewhere to live - so they remain both homeless and unemployed. It's a classic Catch-22 situation. The rules the landlords and employers so rigidly stick to prevent a sane solution to the problem being found. Individually the rules might be understandable. In combination they are nonsensical, but many people - those with the bureaucratic mentality - still refuse to allow common sense to prevail.

As another example, many employers only want workers with experience of working within their particular industry. So, you can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience unless someone gives you a job - another classic Catch-22 situation.

Similarly, many employers have very rigid rules about job applicants having to supply good references from previous employers, including their last employer. You can then easily get into a Catch-22 situation if you've had a bad experience with your last employer - perhaps through no fault of your own - and they won't give you a good reference. Without a good reference from your last employer, you can't get another job, but unless you get a new job you'll never get a good reference.

Most of us live in a society where rules are often applied simply for the sake of applying the rules and regardless of how nonsensical a situation that sometimes results in.

Many rules have a point and a purpose. They may be supposed to prevent harm or support fairness. They are not supposed to be there merely for the sake of having rules. Yet, so many people, so many administrators and officials, seem to forget this. Often, they are also under pressure from their superiors and may feel that the best way to protect themselves from criticism is to thoughtlessly apply the rules without flexibility and without reference to common sense. Often, they apply nonsensical rules for malicious reasons or because they simply don't care about the difficulties their bureaucratic mentality is causing.

Catch-22 is a humorous book, but, in real life, being stuck in a Catch 22 situation, or being thwarted by nonsensical bureaucracy in other ways, can be much worse than merely frustrating. It can severely undermine your freedom and your dignity. It can even, as demonstrated, leave you unemployed and living on the streets. When your important needs are frustrated by rampant bureaucracy and by people being unreasonable and rigidly sticking to rules that make no sense, it can be very far from a laughing matter.

When someone refers to 'a police state,' not everyone is entirely clear about what is being referred to.

Civilised countries have police officers and police forces, but they also have 'the rule of law.' This means that no-one is above the law - not even the police or the people who make the laws. The police enforce the law, but they are also constrained by the law.

In many countries around the world, however, the police don't pay much attention to what the law says about what they are or are not allowed to do. A police state is one where the police are in charge and where they are effectively above the law. They might be under the control of a dictator or other form of government, but the point is that they go around picking on people that they or their political masters don't like. There is no 'rule of law.' And the police in many of these countries very often have some pretty brutal methods of maintaining control of the population and disciplining anyone who dares to challenge their authority.

In a police state, the law is largely irrelevant. If the police or the state don't like you, they'll find some way to get you and persecute you. This may be unsupported by the law - for example, when a police officer just comes around and beats you up a bit - or it may be supported by draconian laws put in place by a vile dictator that are only actually used against the people the police or government perceive as their enemies. If they want to get you, they'll find some excuse to do so. It's not about whether you've done anything wrong. They might just take a dislike to you because you expressed an opinion they don't like very much.

Imagine being stopped in the street by a police officer and they ask you where you are going. In a civilised country, you can tell the police officer to mind his (or her) own business. In a lot of countries, however, if you did this, you might well get cuffed around the head or have the butt of a rifle whacked into your stomach. The police will not tolerate you speaking to them in that way.

Of course, it's usually illegal for the police to beat you up in this way - but, in a lot of countries, that's largely irrelevant. The police see themselves as masters, not public servants. They are 'in charge' and you'd better just do as you are told!

You even get this sort of behaviour in otherwise democratic countries. Doubtless there are remote places in the United States where the local sheriff thinks he has a right to overstep the boundaries of the law in what he sees as 'his' territory.

In a modern, civilised nation, the police are supposed to apply the law fairly. They are supposed to protect people from harm. They are supposed to act against people who break the law and cause harm to others in some way. They are not supposed to target people they don't like or provide special favours to friends, colleagues and acquaintances. They are not supposed to be after particular people who don't support the government and they shouldn't be turning a blind eye to the crimes of people with power and influence. Everyone is supposed to be equal under the law.

Unfortunately, even in modern, generally civilised countries, the government or police do sometimes behave in ways that take us rather closer to being in a police state than any sensible, freedom-loving country should allow.

Sometimes, the police or other authorities are given intrusive or excessive powers. They might seek to justify their powers by saying they are necessary in the fight against terrorism, before then going on to overuse and abuse these powers for matters that aren't terrorist-related at all.

Some countries have vague, catch-all laws that could be used to turn almost anyone into a criminal if strictly applied. Some laws allow them to arrest and prosecute people simply because someone claims to have been offended by something they said or wrote.

A further problem is that many countries now have so many laws, setting out so many criminal offences, that they can't possibly all be enforced. Consequently, many offences are generally ignored, but then applied only to specific people the authorities don't happen to like.

For example, the age of consent in the UK is 16. Having sex with someone below this age is a crime. In fact, it is classed as child rape, as the underage person is not considered legally capable of consenting to sex. Sex amongst teenagers, however, is generally ignored by the police, even when one of the partners is below the age of consent.

If surveys are to be believed, millions of people first had sex when they were below the age of consent, suggesting there may be millions of people around the country who are technically guilty of raping a child. The crime is routinely ignored, however, unless it happens to have been committed by someone the authorities don't happen to like for some political or otherwise prejudicial reason of their own. Then they may prosecute and send that person to prison for a long stretch. A small number of people are selectively prosecuted for a crime, despite that exact same crime being committed by millions of other people, yet being routinely ignored. That doesn't sound like the fair and impartial application of the law!

Having too many laws and having vague catch-all laws creates a system that is open to abuse by the police and other authorities. It puts them in a position where they are forced to be selective about who they prosecute and who they don't prosecute. They end up with too much power to prosecute people they don't happen to like or whose prosecution would be politically popular whilst selectively ignoring the crimes of their friends, colleagues and political allies.

We end up with Members of Parliament, police officers and public officials escaping prosecution and getting nothing but a light ticking-off for fiddling their expenses, when an ordinary, relatively poor person would get sent to jail for stealing much less. We get ordinary people prosecuted for offending people, whilst many police officers go unpunished for using the sort of excessive force that would see ordinary people put in jail. It's far from an all-out police state, but it hardly seems like the faithful application of the rule of law either.

Any reasonably alert person ought to know something about the right to silence. Many of us will be familiar with American films and TV shows where police officers advise suspects that they have 'the right to remain silent.'

In the UK, however, the right to remain silent has been partially abolished. Criminal suspects are now told that they don't have to say anything, but "it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court." In other words, you don't have to say anything, but that might result in you going to prison because your silence makes the jury suspicious.

One of the reasons the idiot politicians in the UK were allowed to get away with making this change was that, whilst most people are familiar with the idea of the right to silence, few people could explain why we have it or why it is important for the maintenance of a free society. This doesn't stop it being important, however.

One good reason for having a right to silence is that, if you didn't have this right, then that would encourage police officers to try to contrive a case against you even though they don't have any real, solid evidence to back up their accusations.

If the police are able to insist that you answer their questions, they might then be tempted to try and confuse you and make you look bad as a result of any mistakes, however minor, that you might happen to make as a result. They would pick on any apparent discrepancies that are almost bound to occur when you're made to recount something many times over - inaccuracies in memory or misuses of language that naturally occur even when people are telling the truth. They may misinterpret an attempt to protect your privacy as a sign of guilt. In such a situation, the police, desperate to get a result, are encouraged to interrogate you beyond reason. By having a right to silence, we can insist the police come up with some more solid evidence rather than trying to hoodwink a jury into distrusting you.

There is, however, a far more fundamental and important reason for having a right to silence. Suppose you live in a free country. If a police officer stops you in the street and says, 'Where are you going?' you can tell him to mind his own bloody business! You don't have to explain yourself to the police officer. You are not accountable to the police.

Many people in many parts of the world might find this idea difficult to accept. Their own police would not be prepared to put up with such 'insolence' and might well give the person in question a good beating with a baton. Instead of being resentful of such treatment, many people give in to this police intimidation and then get resentful of anyone who has the courage to stand up to the police, when they do not dare.

In civilised western countries, however, the police are supposed to be public servants, not our masters. You don't have to explain to any police officer where you're going or who you're going to see or why you are where you are. This is a very important part of being free. It's not down to you to reveal or explain any such things to the state.

The only exception is if you go to court accused of a criminal offence, and the prosecution put a very strong and believable, seemingly compelling case against you. You then have the opportunity to poke holes in their case by, for example, pointing out what you were actually doing at the time you are accused of committing a crime. The prosecution might appear to have proven the case against you, but you may decide to add some extra explanation to help the jury avoid making the mistake of convicting you for something you didn't do.

But, unless and until you have just such a strong, seemingly convincing case against you, you don't have to explain your actions - and that's a very important part of not having a police state. The police are accountable to the public, not the other way round.

Without the right to silence, it is the public that becomes accountable to the police - and that's the start of a police state. A society that doesn't see this danger, that is no longer educated enough to realise the importance of this principle, is a broken society urgently in need of a better education system.

Sigmund Freud was possibly the most famous psychologist who has ever lived. Some might say he was largely responsible for the popularity of psychology as a subject, for its prominent place in our culture and for the way human behaviour is popularly interpreted.

Popular psychology is predominantly based on Freud's ideas about how our minds work and about how our individual characteristics are developed and determined. The most prominent of these ideas is the notion that a person's character and their psychological problems often have their roots in past 'traumas' - dramatic events that took place earlier in their lives.

Pick a psychiatrist from film or television and the chances are they will be a very Freudian psychiatrist and that their methods will be largely based on Freud's 'psychoanalytical' approach to psychology. They'll ask their patients to sit on a couch and discuss their background and their childhood insecurities. They'll try to identify the traumatic experiences that might have resulted in their patient's present psychological problems and insecurities. Their 'treatment' is to encourage the patient to 'face up to' and 'come to terms with' these experiences.

Such depictions encourage us to believe that people's current psychological problems can usually be explained by their early life experiences. A person is obsessed with money and it is said to be because they were very poor as a child. A person is violent because they suffered physical abuse as a child. A person lacks confidence because their parents had too high expectations of them. These are the accepted ways of explaining why a person is as they are - not just in films, but in real life too. The trouble is, however, that these ideas are usually little more than wild speculation, often totally unsupported by the available scientific evidence.

Suppose, for example, that we find an individual who struggles to form lasting relationships with women. Suppose that we then discover that his mother left home when he was only eight years old. We might think that we have discovered the cause of his psychological difficulties. We might suppose that he finds it difficult to trust women because of the way his mother seemingly abandoned him when he was a child. In fact, however, it's usually nothing more than wild speculation that the two things are linked. You don't usually have any real evidence to back up such a theory. It's barely any more scientific than saying this individual had relationship problems because he once saw his favourite football team lose when he was a child.

If you took a scientific approach and did a survey of a thousand men whose mothers left home when they were eight years old, you'd probably find that, as a group, they had no more difficulties in relationships than any group of a thousand men chosen at random.

So, the fact that a boy's mother left home when he was young, is not, in any way, a reliable indicator that he will struggle to form relationships when he is older. There may be no scientific evidence, therefore, that such a childhood trauma gives us any power either to predict future relationship problems or to explain them when they do occur. Knowledge of such a childhood trauma, therefore, explains nothing.

This is not to say that people aren't affected - sometimes dramatically - by traumatic events in their lives. However, two people's reactions to the same event can be very different - perhaps even completely opposite reactions.

One person who was treated badly as a child, becomes a terrible parent themselves and we might put this down as due to their traumatic childhood. Another person, however, who suffered in almost exactly the same way, turns out to be a brilliant parent themselves, perhaps precisely because they were determined not to repeat the mistakes of their own parents.

So the fact that someone had a traumatic childhood, often has no predictive power in terms of telling us how they themselves will fare as parents. If they do turn out to be poor parents, we have no real idea whether this was due to traumatic events in their childhood or if the two things are completely unrelated.

Of course, if you go through a person's life history, you're pretty much bound to come across an unhappy event of some kind or another before long. This doesn't demonstrate that there is any cause and effect link between their unhappy memories and any current psychological difficulties they might be experiencing. So, they have some unhappy memories - but doesn't everyone?

Besides which, Freudians will often try to have it both ways. If someone is violent, they'll say this was a result of the violence they experienced during childhood. If someone is timid, they'll say this was because of the violence they experienced during childhood. In other words, their theories fail to predict what effect childhood violence is likely to have. It might make a person violent or it might make them timid - they just can't tell.

Despite the frequently unscientific nature of Freudian psychoanalysis, however, it remains the normal and accepted way of analysing our psychological problems and difficulties. When people meet in pubs, bars or restaurants and discuss psychology - in real life or in films - they often talk as if assuming that people's personalities really are determined by past events in their lives. So, why do we stubbornly persist with these unscientific explanations?

Well, the likely - and rather unsavoury - answer is that many people find Freudian psycho-babble very convenient because it allows them to blame their character flaws on childhood traumas or other events that they have no control over. They'd far rather do this than accept the blame or even the responsibility for their personal failings. They'd much rather say, "I struggle to form long-term relationships because I had a difficult childhood," than take responsibility for their own failings and admit, "Yes, I fail in relationships because I'm a selfish git!"

Freudian-style explanations don't really help us understand why people behave as they do. They're just the acceptable form of excuse for why people behave the way they do - an excuse for their failings and an excuse for why they 'can't' change!

People don't want to accept the responsibility for their failings. They'd far rather the blame was seen to lie with something that happened in the past - preferably the distant past - that was beyond their control. Freudian explanations may be unscientific, but they are usually far more convenient, more soothing, less hurtful and more politically-correct than the truth.

In fact, what scientific evidence and analysis does tell us is that it's much more revealing to look, not at the traumatic events a person may have been through in their lives, but at the attitudes they took towards those events and the ways they responded to them.

For one person, a car accident seems to be the start of a downward cycle. For another, such an accident spurs them on to be even more determined than they were before the accident and even more determined to live life to the full.

It is not triumph or disaster that shapes us, but our reaction to that triumph or disaster. Furthermore, the way each of us is likely to react to such things can be scientifically predicted, based on our behaviour and attitudes towards other events.

We are at the crux here of the question of what it is that makes you what you are. Yes, you are affected by the events in your life, but you are not merely a passive product of your childhood or lifetime experiences. There's something much more fundamental at work.

There's next to no evidence that our fundamental characters as adults are the result of childhood traumas. It isn't the problems, challenges and difficulties we face that define who we are - it's how we react to them that is much more important.

It's not events that determine your character. It's your fundamental character that determines how you react to and shape the events in your life - and, even more importantly, what you can learn from them.

Carl Jung is another famous psychologist. He was around at the same time as Sigmund Freud. The two men knew each other. At their first meeting, it is reported they talked for thirteen hours. They also exchanged many letters. They were mutually respectful, but they also had some major disagreements, as their views on psychology came to differ in rather fundamental ways.

Some of their differences were part of the wider 'nature versus nurture' debate. Whereas Freud is strongly associated with the idea of people's personality being shaped by events, especially those of their childhood, Jung is more associated with how a person's inbuilt character affects the way they see and interact with the world and how they respond to the events in their lives and to other people.

Jung's most famous contributions to psychology are his ideas about introversion and extroversion. Jung described how some people's behaviour and beliefs are highly influenced by their environment and the people around them. He described such people as 'extroverted.' As a simple example, their moods, their taste in music and their political beliefs might be highly influenced by the moods, tastes and expressed beliefs of the people in their peer group - the friends and associates that they most often hang around with. Often, they will conform to what other people like in order that they can 'fit in' and feel part of a group.

Jung noticed that many other people, however, tend to be far less easily influenced by their environment and by their peer group, and seem to have much more internal, more independent ways of forming opinions and deciding upon their actions. Jung described such people as 'introverted.'

Jung noticed that whether someone was an introvert or extrovert, it wasn't something that appeared to be determined by a person's upbringing or by their environment. It was more a matter of inbuilt character.

Jung wasn't dividing the population into two distinct categories. Jung recognised that people exist somewhere on a scale with extreme extroversion at one end and extreme introversion at the other. Few people are either extreme extroverts or extreme introverts, but most people have a clear tendency towards one side of the scale rather than the other.

Our society today seems to be a highly extroverted one, in that there is a great deal of pressure on people for them to conform to the ideas and behaviour patterns of other people. There's a great deal of emphasis placed on the importance of 'fitting in' and 'getting on.'

Jung's work, however, highlights the idea that external influences are not the only factors determining our lives, our attitudes and our behaviour, as our modern society often seems to assume that they are. We don't all allow ourselves to be pushed around by whatever ideas and attitudes happen to be popular or acceptable at the time.

As individual human beings, we have the opportunity to think about our behaviour and our ideas for ourselves and to develop our own opinions. Many people barely ever take advantage of this opportunity, but some people do.

We each have our own individual instincts about what is good or bad, admirable or despicable. Some people listen to these instincts. Others do not - they are influenced instead, by the situation they find themselves in and the people who surround them.

Some of us develop our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong. We form our own outlook on how things are and how things should be. Others are content to go along with the crowd, however thoughtless and unethical that crowd might be.

Yet, to fail to at least listen to your own instincts and to fail to use your capacity to make up your own mind about things, is to surrender some of your most important freedoms. If we value freedom, then it is down to us to use our capacity to think for ourselves, to differ from the crowd and to stand up for what we individually believe in, not for what happens to be popular or 'acceptable' to other people.

Being truly alive is a matter of being prepared to exercise your freedom to form opinions for yourself and to form and follow your own ideas about what is right and wrong, just and unjust - to live by your own sense of morality. It is about being prepared to be yourself, to assert your own character instead of allowing your behaviour and opinions to be dictated to you from outside. It is a matter of deciding for yourself who you are and what it is you stand for.

Who you are is a matter, not of the things that happen to you in life, but of the way you react to those events. It is not about the hardships and challenges you face. It is about how you react to those hardships and challenges - and that is a question of character. To have character, you need to develop it for yourself. You need to decide for yourself what standards you should live by and have the determination to continue striving to live up to them.

'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' is a famous story by Robert Louis Stevenson. It concerns a Dr Jekyll who developed a potion that results in him transforming between his usual self and the mysterious Mr Hyde. Mr Hyde is essentially the evil side of his character. Unrestricted by normal moral restraints, he commits various violent acts, including murder.

Whatever the original intent of the story, the term 'Jekyll and Hyde' is very much in use today as a way to describe certain types of people. A 'Jekyll and Hyde character' is someone who seems to have two very different sides to their personality. Often, it will be someone who may switch between these two sides rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Even more specifically, it may be used to describe someone who may appear friendly but who can easily turn on you without warning.

Of course, in most cases, in real life, such people haven't really suddenly turned nasty. The truth, unfortunately, is that they were horrible people all along - it just suited them for a while to pretend otherwise. The minute it no longer suits them to be friendly, they can more freely express their real attitude of selfishness and greed. Such people have no integrity, just expediency.

It may be that Dr Jekyll transformed into Mr Hyde, because he wanted to be free from moral restraint. Perhaps he thought that was freedom - and many modern-day Jekyll and Hyde characters seem to follow a similar sort of motivation. They want to be able to do what they want to do without having to worry about their moral responsibilities - without having to worry about what is right and what is wrong.

True freedom, however, is not about simply doing what you want without thought or consequence or without reference to what is right or wrong. Let's hope that we can be free, yet have integrity and decency at the same time. Simply doing what suits us is not freedom - since that would mean we are being dictated to by circumstances.

Freedom should mean being able to decide for ourselves what we individually believe is right and wrong and then to be able to decide how much of an effort we are going to make to stick by the moral code each of us has chosen for ourselves.

Many of the most celebrated victories throughout history have been the battles that were won seemingly against enormous odds.

Agincourt was one such celebrated victory, fought in 1415 in France between an enormous French army and the much smaller 'band of brothers' led by Henry V of England - which, it should be noted, included a great many Welshmen.

The exact numbers are disputed, but all the evidence agrees that the 'English' were massively outnumbered. To say the English had about 6000 men compared to about 30,000 French is only an estimate, but gives an idea of the numbers involved. The English had also been on a tiring campaign through France. They had marched some 260 miles in the previous two weeks, had been hit by sickness as they travelled and were short on food. On the face of it, they appeared to have little or no chance of victory against a far larger and much fresher French army. The battle however, resulted in an overwhelming victory for Henry's men.

The victory at Agincourt was to a considerable extent a result of the mastery of the longbow demonstrated by Henry's men. The longbow was a technological marvel of its time. It was formed from yew trees. The bow stave was cut from the tree in such a way that the outer side consists of sapwood (which performs well when being stretched and comes from the outer part of the tree) and the inner side consists of heartwood (which resists compression). This naturally-found combination of materials provides a very powerful bow, capable of firing an arrow with such force as to be able to pierce many types of armour. In fact, when Henry VIII's famous warship, The Mary Rose, was raised from the seabed in the 1980s, it was discovered that the longbows found within had several times the power that many people had expected them to have.

The people who used these longbows must have been practically deformed - such was the physical strength required to fire them at full power. They would also have been incredibly skilled, having been brought up from youth in a culture that revered the longbow and the skills of marksmanship. In the hands of an expert the longbow was capable of operating at very long range - perhaps up to 400 yards - and was extremely accurate and deadly at much shorter ranges. Becoming an expert in the use of the longbow, however, would have required enormous dedication and years of practice.

On the battlefield of Agincourt, as the massive French army bore down upon the English, they were assaulted by hailstorms of arrows launched from these longbows. A great deal of confusion ensued, with horses and men running backwards and forwards, churning up an already muddy field. French knights, although protected to some extent by their armour, could then barely move in the mud and were easily hacked down by the lightly-armed archers with hatchets and mallets.

Reports suggest that more than 10,000 French may have died. English losses were dramatically, perhaps even miraculously lower, with some sources suggesting they lost fewer than 100 men.

At Agincourt, brotherhood, determination, great skill and extraordinary dedication to developing those skills, paid off, despite the numerical superiority of the enemy.

Agincourt was one of those famous occasions when a few stood against many. We celebrate these occasions because there is something innately virtuous and admirable about remaining loyal to your cause even in the face of adversity and great odds.

On the other hand, there is nothing particularly brave about standing with the majority. And there is nothing innately admirable about simply having sheer numbers on your side. It doesn't guarantee victory in any case and it most certainly doesn't guarantee that you are in the right.

In the game of life, ultimate victory goes to the dedicated, the brave, the principled and the virtuous. Sheer numbers count for nothing against people who maintain their loyalties and refuse to surrender their principles no matter what the odds appear to be.

Our education system may be in a terrible state, but most people have at least heard of Shakespeare. He is, of course, widely regarded as probably the greatest writer who has ever lived (although some argue that the famous William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon was not actually the person who wrote the plays).

For many people, however, his plays are merely just very, very boring things they were forced to read through at school. The trouble is that whilst our schools may 'do' Shakespeare, they generally fail to get their students to appreciate just how great a writer he was and just why his works are so astonishing.

What can sometimes make the experience of reading Shakespeare frustrating and boring, of course, is when there are so many unfamiliar words that you either don't understand what's going on or you have to spend most of your time flicking through a dictionary - or both!

This isn't really Shakespeare's fault of course. In his day, his plays were popular entertainment for fairly ordinary people. They were certainly not elitist plays that could only be appreciated by highly-educated people. The vocabulary of most people today is just not as rich as in Shakespeare's time. There are even people who will have to look up what 'vocabulary' means. It's not Shakespeare's fault that our modern education system is so woefully inadequate.

There's certainly nothing intrinsically boring about Shakespeare's plays. Some bits aren't as interesting as others, but, on the whole, they're pretty packed with interesting ideas, exciting storylines, emotion, violence and intrigue.

And there are plenty of great speeches that aren't, by any stretch, remotely difficult to read or to understand. Consider the following example. Mark Anthony in 'Julius Caesar' is about to start a war to reek revenge on those people who betrayed and murdered his friend, Julius Caesar. He says:

'Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:

And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,

With Ate' by his side come hot from Hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war,

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.'

Wow - pretty powerful stuff! And what's difficult to understand about that? Our 'hero' is vowing to unleash a war so bloody and terrible that dreadful, murderous deeds shall seem like normal everyday events. He's not mincing his words about it either.

One of the most famous speeches across all of Shakespeare's plays is from Henry V, when the King is speaking to his soldiers before the famous battle of Agincourt. The English soldiers are massively outnumbered and appear to face almost certain defeat. Some of his men are considering the enormous odds they face and wish they had some more men from England. The King, however, has something to say:

'..........O, do not wish one more!

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart. His passport shall be made,

And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

We would not die in that man's company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say, "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say, "These wounds I had on Crispian's day."

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words,

Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.'

Nothing difficult there! In the first bit, he's basically just saying: 'If there's anyone who doesn't have the decency, courage and sense of brotherhood to fight alongside the rest of us in this desperate hour, then we're better off without him.'

In the second part, he's saying: 'Hey, look, we're going into battle. The odds are against us. We're massively outnumbered and maybe we will lose. But hold firm! Just think; if we pull this one off, you'll all be amongst the greatest heroes who have ever lived. No matter if you are a poor peasant, when you speak, the noblest and richest people in England will hang their heads in shame that they were not here alongside you. Even in hundreds of years' time, people will still tell stories and think and wonder and stand in awe of what you achieved on this great day.'

Nothing particularly fancy about the speech, but it embodies the spirit of Agincourt that is still spoken reverently about today - for it was a real historical battle, the English were indeed massively outnumbered and they did indeed pull off one of the greatest military victories in history against all the odds.

What's rather disturbing is that, whilst most people today still know that Shakespeare was 'supposedly' a great writer, they don't appreciate what it is that makes his plays so great.

There are probably millions who think he may or may not have been a great writer, but that he was terribly 'long-winded.' In fact, the opposite was the case. He could imbue as much meaning into a few short words as other people would struggle to convey in hundreds of words. 'Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.' That's pretty damn neat! It says so much and conveys so much emotion in so few words.

Ultimately, though, it is not Shakespeare's writing style that is the key to the astonishing respect in which he is held. He certainly had a wonderful way with words, although some think other writers were just as good, even better.

No, what's really considered special about Shakespeare is that his plays suggest that here was a man who truly understood the human heart and the human condition.

Many of Shakespeare's most acclaimed plays were tragedies. Fortunately, there was no commercial necessity for a happy ending in Shakespeare's time. His tragedies were stories about the bad and terrible things that happen as a result of human frailties. MacBeth was consumed by a thirst for power. King Lear suffered from his foolishness in being deceived by false flattery and as a result of being mean to those who were kind and honest enough to him to tell him the truth he didn't want to hear. Othello allowed himself to be consumed by jealousy. Shakespeare looked into and understood and so accurately described the darkest recesses of the human soul.

Shakespeare understood what it means to be human - the positives and the vile negatives, the honour and the shame - perhaps better than any other person who has ever lived. He knew love and hatred, victory and defeat, courage and despair.

To have freedom is to have choices about how we will act and how we will face the challenges that life deals us. To make good use of our freedoms, it helps to understand ourselves - our weaknesses as well as our strengths. Shakespeare can still assist us a great deal in this quest.

To think, though, that Shakespeare's plays were popular entertainment at the time, but are barely understood by most people today, says a great deal about what has happened to our society in the intervening period. It says a great deal about our 'culture' and the woeful inadequacies of what we dare to call an education system.

During the Second World War, the world faced a threat the likes of which we had never seen before and hope never to see again. The Nazis were more than just bad guys. They were more than just greedy, callous and cruel. They represented astonishing evil. They didn't just kill people who were in their way. Out of blind hatred, men, women and children were lined up and shot. They were herded to the gas chambers in their millions. Yes, there have been many other similarly brutal dictators, but their reach was limited. Their area of operation and influence was much smaller in scale. They may have threatened a country, but not usually the whole world.

In Britain, in America and in many other places, we pride ourselves on the roles our countries played in bringing down the Nazi regime. The US takes pride in having provided the bulk of the forces and equipment for the western front. Britain takes particular pride in having fought first and fought longest - for having stood in the breach until the allies arrived. But make no mistake - it was in the harsh wintry lands of the Soviet Union that Hitler was stopped.

The Brits may have got in first by inflicting an important land defeat on the Germans at El Alamein in North Africa, but one place more than any other represents the key turning point of the Second World War and that place is Stalingrad. It was here that Hitler's seemingly unstoppable Wehrmacht were halted - here in the depths of a Russian winter.

The German war machine relied on Blitzkrieg tactics. Lighting war; sudden attacks, fast-moving campaigns that surprised and confused the enemy, such that the battle was usually lost before they really knew what was happening to them. The Germans relied on shock tactics and on momentum.

But this was different. Here, on the banks of the Volga, the Germans had lost their momentum. They were never to regain it. This was deep war. Intractable conflict. A desperate grind through the rubble that was once a city.

Across much of the city, each piece of rubble was fought over time and time again - captured and lost and recaptured. This was an old-fashioned war of attrition. German artillery and bombers at first seemed to be doing great damage, but they could have little effect on a city once it had already been reduced to rubble. When you bomb rubble, you just end up with slightly rearranged rubble. When someone is hiding in a building, you can shell or bomb the building, but, once destroyed, if the enemy is not sufficiently shocked to immediately retreat (or has nowhere to retreat to), the rubble itself becomes a defensive fortress.

You can bomb and shell your enemy, but before too long, the enemy becomes used to the bombing, used to the shelling - and when that happens, the Germans' blitzkrieg tactics could no longer be effective. You get used to war. You can get used to anything. The horrific becomes normal. It doesn't stop being horrific, but, in a strange sense, it ceases to matter.

The Germans were not equipped for a long, protracted war, but the Russians were. Russia had reserves of resources the Germans could only dream of - not just in terms of natural resources and in terms of people, but in terms of the will to survive and the intractable determination to destroy an enemy they hated beyond measure.

The Germans were used to enemies who collapsed in the face of determined aggression. The Soviets had retreated across hundreds and hundreds of miles in the face of the German onslaught, but here in Stalingrad, the Soviets would make the stand that determined the future direction of the most destructive war the world has ever seen.

Yes, there were bigger battles to come. The vast tank battle around Kursk was probably the biggest engagement between the two sides and was where the main bulk of the German armour was torn to shreds, but it was the slow deadly grind of Stalingrad, the bitter fighting and sniping amongst the rubble of a city virtually destroyed, that was the great turning point of the war.

After Stalingrad, there was no longer much doubt about how the war would end. The Soviet people were simply not going to surrender. The war would be won - not that year and not the next, but the outcome was decided nevertheless.

Hitler had believed the Russians to be inherently inferior to the Germans, but he came up against a people whose depths of fortitude and determination were far beyond what his own side could ever have imagined.

The Siege of Leningrad lasted for some two-and-a-half years. The people of that city endured astonishing hardship. In terms of casualties, it was by far the costliest siege in all of history. The city was bombed, shelled and starved. Millions died, but there was no surrender.

The Germans had failed to properly appreciate that many Russian people thought that winter weather that fell below -40C was normal. Having failed to respect people who lived and worked and brought up their families in such harsh conditions every year, the Germans were eventually forced to respect how tenaciously such people could fight, not just to survive, but to wreak vengeance on the enemy who had come to murder them.

Being 'hard' is not a question of how much punishment you can dish out - it's about how much you can take. The Soviets suffered the loss of perhaps 30 million dead, but they would have paid an even higher price had it been necessary.

It is in harsh conditions that you find out what people are really made of - and, in the Russian winter, in places such as Stalingrad and Leningrad, the formidable Germans came up short against an enemy who considered extraordinarily harsh conditions to be normal and therefore, nothing they should be concerned about. There were Russian women who had more hardness in their little fingers than was available across the entire Wehrmacht.

German troops in Russia discovered that they had been lied to. The propaganda they'd been fed about Russian inferiority, about lesser species, was just that; propaganda. The Germans faced the slow but unavoidable realisation that, if there was a master race, they weren't it!

Stalingrad represents bitter determination. It stands for bitter, bitter war. It stands for how tough conditions show what people are really made of. It demonstrates - and celebrates - how the might of a sophisticated, technologically-advanced, highly-organised military machine can be brought down by the implacable resistance that stems from utter determination - from glorious, intractable, human determination.

The indomitable human spirit rarely appears so noble as it sometimes does in the midst of an horrific war fought between annihilation and survival.

Andrew Cunningham was a legendary admiral of the Royal Navy. A bust of Admiral Cunningham is permanently displayed in Trafalgar Square in London.

Cunningham is most famous for his role in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. With Italy as Germany's ally, the Axis powers might well have expected to be able to dominate the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, with only sparse resources, Cunningham helped mastermind a daring strategy for the Royal Navy to dominate the Mediterranean. It was a hard-fought battle, but through incredible daring and guile, the British gained the upper hand, resulting in the first major land-defeat of the Germans in the war.

The British Army's Desert Rats had been fighting backwards and forwards with the famous Afrika Korps commanded by the Desert Fox himself - the greatly admired (by all sides) Erwin Rommel. Rommel was a brilliant tactician. His Panzer tanks and tactics were far superior to those of the British. His men were superb soldiers - who, interestingly, appeared to have engaged in (almost) none of the barbarous behaviour common amongst their countrymen in other battlezones.

Ultimately, however, they were defeated in the decisive battle of El Alamein by the British forces under Montgomery - the first major land defeat inflicted on the Nazi war machine. Their defeat was due to one primary factor - the Royal Navy. The Afrika Korps remained superior forces in many ways, but Montgomery's supplies got through, whilst Rommel's did not - they were lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, thanks to the superb seamanship, tactics and strategy of the Royal Navy under Admiral Cunningham.

Perhaps the most decisive blow in the Mediterranean was inflicted by the famous raid at Taranto. In one of the most daring, audacious and successful raids in history, Cunningham used seemingly outdated Swordfish biplanes, equipped with torpedoes and launched at night from the aircraft carrier Illustrious, to cripple the Italian Fleet at anchor in their fortress port of Taranto.

The Swordfish planes flew through a hail of gunfire and delivered their torpedoes with inhuman accuracy in the blackness of night using little more than steely determination and nerves of ice. One night, a handful of dated biplanes and some incredibly skilful and daring pilots and the powerful Italian navy was dealt a massive blow that would dramatically reduce it's confidence and influence for the rest of the war.

This incredible raid was, in fact, to change the course of the entire war, not just the war in the Mediterranean. The Japanese were so impressed by the raid that they used it as a model for their attack on Pearl Harbor and thus brought the huge industrial might of the United States into the war.

The Japanese were not as accurate as their Royal Navy counterparts, but, with far greater resources at hand, produced a tactically successful raid. The Japanese raid, however, was a strategic disaster, picking a fight they could never win, whilst the British raid was a strategic masterstroke as well as a stunning tactical success.

Admiral Cunningham, himself, however, is perhaps most famous for something he said during one of the major setbacks of the Mediterranean campaign. This setback came when the Germans launched a massive and daring airborne invasion of the Island of Crete. This raid was a groundbreaking manoeuvre at the time and remains perhaps the biggest and most successful airborne invasion in history. (D-day may have been a bigger air operation - but that was mainly a sea-borne invasion.)

As the Germans took control of the island (and took control of the airport, enabling them to fly in many more troops), an attempt was made to rescue the thousands of British troops who were stationed there. Cunningham's ships attempted the evacuation whilst under massive attack from the German airforce - the Luftwaffe. Cunningham's valuable ships, however, were being sunk. In fact, during the battle of Crete, he lost three cruisers and six destroyers and fifteen other major warships were damaged.

Amidst pressure to call off the evacuation efforts, however, Cunningham refused and simply issued these momentous words: "It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition." In other words, regardless of the number of ships that he would lose, it was against the fine principles and great traditions of the Royal Navy to abandon the army to be captured by the Germans and he point-blank refused to do it. Quite extraordinary!

In many ways, the lost ships were worth more to the war effort than the men who might have been captured by the Germans, but this was not the point. This was about something far bigger than merely winning or losing the biggest and most important war in all of human history. To have abandoned the army to their fate would have undermined everything that he and the Royal Navy stood for. Three hundred years of naval tradition would be lost in the race to win a poxy world war - and he wasn't about to let that happen. 16500 men were successfully rescued from Crete.

What Cunningham said serves as a reminder of a very good point of principle: In your race to win a war, don't sacrifice the very principles you are fighting for - because then, even when you win, you lose. We would do well to remember this principle today. Too often, the fight against terrorism is used as an excuse for allowing our governments to undermine important freedoms.

What Cunningham was saying was, 'If we go down, we go down with our principles and values intact.' It was recognition, even in the heat of battle and in the face of heavy losses, that we were not just fighting to win, but we were fighting for something - fighting for the traditions, values and freedoms that we held dear and which the Nazi regime was trying desperately to take away - not just from us, but from the whole world.

As demonstrated by the Crete incident, Cunningham was, in some ways, an insubordinate character - he didn't always do as he was told - and the Royal Navy's impressively successful history is testament to the importance of a culture that accepts and even encourages a certain amount of insubordination.

It is true that armies and navies and airforces need discipline. You can't have every soldier and sailor going off to do their own thing - so they are all drilled extensively in the need to follow orders. You do need people to follow orders and thus help avoid chaos and defeat. But, armed forces also need insubordinate characters. They need people to question how things are done, so as to avoid the disasters that take place when orders are followed without question.

In a lot of countries, Cunningham would have been fired, possibly prosecuted and possibly even shot. To be in the top division, however, armed forces need a culture that understands the extremely important role of insubordination in a successful organisation.

Britain is not the world power it used to be, but, to this day, no navy in the world can match the history and traditions of the Royal Navy. Those traditions and values were at stake during the Second World War - but, thankfully, they were in the extraordinarily safe hands of the legendary Admiral Cunningham. The Nazi war machine was an awesome fighting machine, but, against people like Cunningham, the Nazis never stood a chance.

In 1588, England was threatened by invasion by a massive Spanish armada. The Spanish planned to sail their huge fleet up the English Channel, rendezvous with a large army near Calais and escort it across the channel to invade England.

Legend has it that Sir Francis Drake - the great explorer, semi-official pirate and naval genius - was playing bowls at the time sightings of the Spanish fleet were reported to him. The fate of England stood in the balance, but, far from panicking, he calmly decided that there was plenty of time to finish his game of bowls, which he did, before sailing forth to meet the Spanish threat. He and his fellow commanders not only defeated and humiliated the Spanish fleet, but did so without the loss of a single ship. This is one example of the famous 'stiff upper lip' for which many British heroes are famed. It is not certain that Drake really did finish his game of bowls or that he was even playing a game of bowls at the time, but however it is illustrated, he most certainly did have a stiff upper lip!

The stiff upper lip is not an exclusive characteristic of the English or the British, of course. A famous American example was the incredible calmness of the crew of Apollo 13. They'd just experienced a large explosion as one of their oxygen tanks had exploded. They were 200,000 miles from Earth, with no possibility of rescue. They were almost certainly going to die - probably rather unpleasantly as they slowly suffocated - and all Jack Swigert says, without the slightest suggestion of any panic in the face of almost certain disaster, is, 'Houston, we've had a problem.' They survived, of course, perfectly executing a ludicrously improbable survival plan - something that was only possible because of their superhuman calm and stiff upper lip attitude.

And, thankfully, the stiff upper lip is not confined to history either. A well-known recent example was when, in January 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger of US Airways Flight 1549 had to ditch his Airbus A320 aircraft in the Hudson River (in New York) following a massive bird strike that took out both his engines. His actions and those of his crew saved the lives of all 155 people on board. You can go on YouTube and listen to the recording of Sully's exchange with air traffic controllers as he dealt with the incident. You can listen to that recording with the best pair of headphones you can get your hands on, but if you can hear the slightest trace of panic in his voice, then either you've got better ears than I have or you're imagining it.

The concept of the stiff upper lip is sometimes misinterpreted to refer to a lack of emotion, but this is not accurate. Having a stiff upper lip means there is no fluster, no panic and no outward expression of fear or apprehension. It means not giving your enemies the satisfaction of seeing you in fear, thinking they've put you off your stride. It means that you refuse to be intimidated by your enemies or your problems. You face them square on, with staunchness and fortitude.

The Grand National is one of the most famous and most gruelling horse races in the world. It is run over more than four miles over imposingly large fences at Aintree, near Liverpool and has been going since 1839. In 1997, however, before the race could begin, the racecourse had to be evacuated following a bomb threat issued by republican terrorists from Northern Ireland. No device was found, but racing had to be abandoned for the day while searches were being conducted. 20,000 spectators were stranded in Liverpool, unable to get to their vehicles which they'd had to leave inside the racecourse. A disaster? A victory for the terrorists? Not a bit of it! The people of Liverpool simply opened their doors to accommodate the spectators who had been left stranded. Two days later, the race went ahead as if nothing had happened, in a joyous celebration of the stiff upper lip.

It was a spectacular own goal for the terrorists, who soon decided, after decades of bloody conflict, to give up their armed struggle and take a seat at the peace table instead. The people of The United Kingdom were obviously not going to be intimidated by terrorism. It wasn't force that defeated the terrorists - it was the stiff upper lip.

It astonishes me, but doesn't surprise me, that most school-leavers today know next to nothing about the Cold War, despite the fact that, for decades, the world stood under the constant threat of annihilation as a result of all the nuclear weapons pointed so threateningly by those on each side of the conflict.

It's not just the nuclear Armageddon stuff that make the Cold War an important thing to know about and understand. It's just as important to understand the ideas and ideologies that the two sides felt so passionately about that they were prepared to threaten nuclear war in order to defend them. These ideas remain central to being able to understand the world as it is today. It's criminal that so many school-leavers know so little about them. Even though the threat of nuclear annihilation is not as strong as it once was, the great ideological debates at the centre of the Cold War are debates that remain fundamentally important today.

The Cold War was a conflict about ideas about the ways in which our societies should be organised. Yes, it was about differing ideals in relation to economics and politics, but it was also, much more fundamentally, about the principles of fairness and about the foundational pillars of freedom.

For the benefit of those who don't know: After the Second World War, the major political, economic and military powers of the world split into two groups. The world was divided into East and West. In the 'West' were the world's major democracies - the US, Canada, Britain and most of Western Europe. In the 'East' were the Soviet Union, which included Russia, and many Eastern European countries.

Many other countries in the world became closely affiliated with one side or the other. Some of these were enthusiastic partners. Others were cajoled or pressured to join up. Both East and West constantly tried to recruit other countries as allies. Some countries joined one side in order to protect themselves from threats from those associated with the other side. Others reluctantly joined one side or other because they felt they had no choice. Sometimes they faced a military threat, sometimes it was for purposes of economic gain. Some countries joined up in the Cold War in order to secure a supply of weapons for civil wars or for use in disputes with neighbouring countries.

Both West and East had its own major military alliance. The west formed NATO - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Each country in Nato pledged to consider an attack on a Nato ally as if it were an attack upon their own territory. The Eastern military alliance was known as The Warsaw Pact, after the agreement of the same name.

These two sides pointed their vast arsenals of nuclear weapons at each other and made threats to each other that put people in fear of a Third World War that both sides would inevitably lose. It was clear there could be no winners in a Third World War in which much of the world would be engulfed in nuclear fireballs and which would condemn the survivors - wherever they were in the world - to a long, highly-radioactive nuclear winter.

The central strategy of the Cold War was chilling, but seemingly effective. This strategy was essentially to guarantee that, no matter who struck first, a nuclear war would result in the annihilation of both sides. Each side had vast numbers of nuclear weapons, aimed and ready for use, and many of these weapons were either heavily shielded, in secret locations or highly mobile - in submarines, for example. This meant that, even if one side in the war were hit by a massive surprise attack, they would still be able to hit back with enough firepower to destroy the other side as well. So, both sides angrily pointed massive arsenals of nuclear weapons at each other and constantly threatened nuclear holocaust if the other side launched so much as a single nuclear missile.

This strategy might seem crazy, but it was, in fact, merely MAD; otherwise known as Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD meant that there was no point either side starting a nuclear war, because nothing could possibly be gained by doing so - and if no-one started a nuclear war, there would never be a nuclear war.

Fortunately - and, at times, it was more due to luck than to judgement - the two sides never engaged in the dreaded Third World War. However, they did find other ways to compete against each other.

One of these was through engaging in a massive decades-long arms race. Each side wanted to have the most impressive and most extensive weapons systems. They wanted to have the most nuclear weapons, the most capable tanks and armies and the most capable airplanes.

The most deadly part of the cold war was when the two sides engaged in extremely violent proxy wars. These wars often originated as a relatively local dispute between two neighbouring countries or between two factions in the same country. One side would ally itself with the Communist powers of the Eastern Block and receive weapons and economic help in return. The West would often back the other side as a way of fighting against the perceived threat of communism spreading around the world. East and West would supply money, resources, training, weapons and sometimes combat troops to their respective partners.

The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Iran-Iraq war were some of the major proxy conflicts of the Cold War - and millions upon millions of people died as a result of these very hot conflicts. The complications, repercussions and effects of these proxy wars continue to this day.

Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Taliban were trained and equipped by the Americans in order to help them fight against the Soviet invaders. Today, the Taliban use Cold War weaponry and the fighting skills and tactics they used against the Soviets to target the American troops that support the new Afghan government.

Iran still allies itself with Russia and uses this alliance to protect itself from international action to disrupt its nuclear programme. North Korea still acts as if the Cold War is at its peak, threatening its perceived enemies with nuclear missile attacks.

The effects of the Cold War were not all bad, however. It was the Cold War that spurred on the space race. East and West competed in the race to put a man in space (won by the East) and then to put a man on the Moon (won by the West). Sometimes, the Cold War was fought, in a rather gripping and entertaining way, on the sports field, in the basketball arena or across the chess board, as each side tried to use sporting prowess as evidence of the superiority of their respective ideologies.

Young people need to know more about nuclear weapons and the threat that they posed and the fear that people lived under for decades. How can we allow young people to grow up in almost complete ignorance of a situation that threatened to end the very existence of most of the world's civilisations and possibly threaten mankind with extinction - and all in such recent times?

Yet, it is perhaps even more important that they understand the ideologies that divided the two sides. Those ideologies were about something more important than nuclear war - they were about freedom. East and West, in general, had very different political systems and ran their economies and their societies very differently from each other.

The two opposing systems were based on very different attitudes towards markets. In the West, markets were viewed as a key way in which people could exercise their freedoms. People were largely free to interact with other people in the 'market place' - and to make their own decisions about what jobs they would try to do and what goods and services they would buy from others. In the West, free markets were (and still are) considered an important pillar of a free society.

In the East, however, governments followed an ideology that believed free markets provided the opposite of freedom. Markets were viewed as the means through which ordinary workers could be exploited and abused by the rich people and corporations who owned the means of production - factory owners, for example.

The truth is that both sides were, to some extent, right. Whilst it can be great to be able to exercise our individual freedoms in a free market, large businesses and corporations do often exploit people. They often have too much power to effectively force ordinary workers to work long hours for low wages. Consequently, it does sometimes happen that many business owners become incredibly rich, whilst many hard-working ordinary people remain desperately poor.

Markets are certainly not perfect. The governments of the East recognised this. The trouble was that their solution to imperfect markets was to give enormous power to the state. The state had the power to dictate where people would work, how much they would be paid and what goods they were allowed to buy. Instead of being exploited by businesses, many people in the East just ended up being exploited by their governments instead.

The original intention of communism may well have been a good one; to enable everyone a fair share of the fruits of success. The trouble is that, in practice, communist governments almost always end up developing a huge state security operation - including secret police forces - in order to overrule markets, to keep the population under control and to force people to follow the state's orders and guidance.

The ideology of the West was generally to allow people to freely interact with each other and bargain with each other in the market place to determine such things as who would work where, how much they would be paid and what goods and services they would produce.

In the East, the philosophy was that these decisions should be dictated by the state - supposedly in the interests of 'the people.' Of two main problems with this ideology, one is that it is difficult to find anyone who can be trusted to make these decisions in the interests of 'the people' rather than to further their own self-interests. The other is: Even if you find a benevolent ruler who makes good decisions on behalf of the nation - can that ever make up for people losing their freedom to make decisions for themselves?

In the end, almost all the centrally-planned economies of the East collapsed. Ultimately, their populations demanded freedom to make more decisions for themselves. Not everyone was sure this would make them safer or wealthier. They knew that markets could sometimes seem very unfair, but decided that having unfair markets is still much better than living under an all-powerful state.

They decided that freedom really matters. Even if you are otherwise extremely well-off, without freedom, you are fundamentally poor since, if you are not able to live as a free person, you cannot fully be alive. Perhaps it is better to have freedom and get things wrong than to have the 'right' decision dictated to you by someone else.

The original communist movement asked a reasonable question. It asked if it is possible for people to be motivated, not by personal greed or personal ambition, but by concern for the wellbeing of society in general. The answer is that, if it is possible, it isn't through having an all-powerful police state forcing the population to obey its commands and destroying our fundamental freedoms.

Communism, in theory, is about fairness. The trouble is that, in practice, it often involves imposing 'fairness' - or, rather, imposing the state's own particular view of fairness - which, almost invariably, has very little to do with fairness at all.

Communism promised fairness. It manifestly failed to deliver on this promise. People in positions of power and authority almost always fought to get themselves a better deal than the ordinary people whose interests they were supposed to be looking after.

Central to the collapse of communism was the realisation that, however important equality may be, freedom is even more important. Equality is not a worthwhile goal if the achievement of greater equality undermines our fundamental freedoms to live our lives according to our own principles and values rather than according to rules dictated to us by the state, no matter how well-intentioned those rules might be.

'12 Angry Men' is a very famous film. Made in 1957, it was adapted from a play of the same name and starred Henry Fonda alongside a number of America's best character actors. It is, however, much more than just a famous film - it is an important cultural reference point, for several reasons. It reminds us of many of the important principles of fairness, of justice and of a free society - and of some of the things that can easily get in the way of freedom and justice.

Almost the entire plot of the film takes place in a jury room (and its adjoining bathroom) as the jury are deliberating upon their verdict in a murder trial (in America). A young man is on trial for his life - as he will probably face the death penalty if he is found guilty. He is accused of having murdered his father following a heated argument.

At they start their deliberations, it seems that almost everyone on the jury is already convinced of the defendant's guilt. They soon decide that they ought to have an initial vote before they discuss the trial in any more detail. 11 out of the 12 jurors vote guilty. Only one - the character played by Henry Fonda - votes not-guilty and even he is not convinced the defendant is innocent. He merely says that he is not yet sure of the defendant's guilt.

This, of course, reminds us of the important principle that it is not the jury's job to decide, on balance, whether they believe the prosecution case or the defence case. Decisions on a person's freedom (or, in this case, a person's life) should not be made on the basis of the 'balance of probabilities' - merely deciding whether a defendant is more likely to be guilty or more likely to be innocent.

If juries decided merely on the balance of probabilities, then we'd have tens of thousands of innocent people in jail. The jury's job, therefore, is simply to decide whether the prosecution has proved their case 'beyond reasonable doubt.' The benefit of any doubt should always be given to the person whose freedom is at stake. If there is any reasonable doubt as to the defendant's guilt, then they must be found not-guilty and set free. This, after all, is how you would want to be treated if you were accused of a crime.

The Henry Fonda character is ridiculed by some of the other jurors who believe the defendant is obviously guilty, but he insists on at least considering what doubts there might be about the case put forward by the prosecution. Much to the annoyance of some of the jurors, they begin to examine the case in more detail.

Over the next few hours, through much heated debate (as suggested by the title), the jurors, one by one, accept that there are flaws in the prosecution's case and, one by one, they accept that there is reasonable doubt and that the defendant must therefore be found not-guilty.

Along the way, we discover that many of the jurors were basing their judgements on prejudices of one kind or another. If it wasn't for the Henry Fonda character, these prejudices might have sent a man to his death - a man who may well have been entirely innocent.

We never get to know whether the defendant really was innocent - but that, of course, is just like many real-life cases. In real life, we don't always get to find out 'the truth.' We don't always have all the facts and all the evidence we'd like to have. Our job is to fight for justice and fairness - and justice and fairness require that we do not sent a man to prison or to his death if we are not pretty damn sure of his guilt.

The story shows many of the strengths and weaknesses of the jury system that lies at the heart of our justice system. The jurors are given the opportunity to debate freely and to consider the arguments in detail, eventually reaching a well-considered, common-sense verdict. On the other hand, what would have happened if that one individual - the Henry Fonda character - had not been there? An innocent man might have been executed.

The film celebrates the strengths of the jury system - by showing us how an ultimately rational position can be arrived at through vigorous (and at times, heated) debate. Jury members are shut in a room together and (at least at first) asked to come to a unanimous verdict - one on which they all agree. This forces them to debate and argue their differences. This, quite rightly, is not some sort of election. Having a majority doesn't make you right. Therefore, the majority members of the jury are not allowed to have their way just because they outnumber the opposition. They have to argue their case and try to convince the doubters.

The film also shows us, however, an unpleasant fact we all ought to be aware of, but which our society often chooses not to face up to; that picking twelve people at random to serve on a jury is not going to produce a jury of twelve rational and intelligent people. Indeed, we'd be lucky if there is even one truly rational and intelligent person on the jury, whose thinking abilities are not blighted by prejudice.

Like many other stories, 12 Angry Men is a celebration of the courage of one man who stands against many - but, importantly, in this film, it was not, as we often get, one against many in physical combat. It's not like in 'Gladiator.' This man's weapons were his intellect, his integrity and his fearlessness. 'What did he have to fear?' you might ask - but people do fear in such circumstances. They fear to stand by their principles when the majority are against them. Bravery comes in many forms, as does cowardice. Even some of those people capable of immense physical courage, often lack the courage to stand by their convictions.

12 Angry Men is also a very important reference point for films. It serves as an example of how a film can be compelling, exciting and gripping without any special effects, exotic locations or fancy sets and with little more than a good script and great actors to be working with.

When people complain about CGI-infested modern films that have action and explosions and sophisticated sets, but terrible scripts and shockingly wooden acting, it is often 12 Angry Men that they point to as an example of how a film can be an intelligent film that relies on its story, its script and acting and its ideas, rather than on loud explosions and gimmicks. It is a reference point for a less flashy, more thoughtful time when films didn't have to be big and brash.

12 Angry Men is an old black and white film with almost all the action set in a single room. It has no car chases, no explosions and certainly no computer-generated special effects - yet it is still widely watched today and widely regarded as still the best example of its type and one of the best and most iconic films ever made. You'd hope we could learn something from these facts.

When someone finds a bent spoon or fork in the cutlery drawer, they might say something like, "Who's been in this drawer? Uri Geller?" I suspect most young people would have no idea who Uri Geller was (or is) and no idea what his relationship with spoons and forks might be. There are worse cultural reference points to be missing out on - but there is something rather revealing about the Uri Geller story in terms of what it tells us about how our society has changed since the height of his fame.

Yuri Geller was a prominent showman and personality who probably reached the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s. He was famous throughout much of the world for many years.

He claimed to have psychokinetic powers - the ability to affect physical objects using the power of his mind. His most common demonstration of his powers was to hold a spoon or fork in his hand and to make it bend and, very often, break, seemingly just by looking at it or perhaps just stroking it gently with his finger.

Was it nothing more than a conjuring trick? Very possibly. It's possible that he bent the cutlery (and then bent it back) while no-one was looking. The idea is that the spoon or fork might then look normal, but the metal would have been fatigued, meaning it would bend and break very easily when gently manipulated again.

So, perhaps it was a conjuring trick and not psychokinesis after all. What is perhaps more important, however, is the reaction to his performances at the time - back in the 1970s, for example. This reaction told of a society that was not so sceptical as our society today. Millions were ready to believe that the mind might really have special powers that went largely unused. They were ready to believe that people could train their minds to develop their psychic abilities.

Many people today would probably laugh at such 'nonsense.' We live in a more sceptical society. Yet perhaps we could learn some things from the society of the 1970s.

You don't have to believe in psychokinesis to believe that the power of the mind can change things - that, through ideas, you can change the world for real. Society in the 1970s was, in many ways, more open-minded and more optimistic.

Our society's scepticism isn't just directed at psychic powers. Today, we too often allow ourselves to be constrained by inflexible notions about what is and isn't possible. We're too ready to believe that things can't be changed.

Yet, the human mind does have enormous potential that goes largely unused and unexplored. It may or may not be able to develop psychic abilities - but it certainly has the potential for a far greater level of intelligence than most people ever bother to explore.

Voltaire was a French, 18th century writer and philosopher. He was also something of an Anglophile. He managed to get himself into a quarrel in France, but avoided prison by choosing exile in England instead. Whilst in England, he came to appreciate the support he found there for important freedoms. He again made himself unpopular upon his return to France - at least, with some people - when he wrote about his admiration for Britain's more enlightened attitudes towards such things as freedom of speech.

I cannot claim any special familiarity with Voltaire's life or works, but I am, as any reasonably educated person ought to be, very familiar with the phrase most famously associated with him and with the principle that famous phrase embodies.

The famous phrase was this: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

It was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, an English writer, who coined this actual phrase. She was writing a biography of Voltaire and used this phrase to sum up what she saw as Voltaire's beliefs regarding freedom of speech.

The famous phrase is often mistakenly attributed to Voltaire himself - and sometimes to other famous people who were actually just making use of the famous phrase to describe their free speech principles. Whilst he perhaps never said those exact words, however, the phrase probably does pretty accurately express Voltaire's sentiments and his philosophical views and ideals regarding freedom of speech.

Famous as this phrase still is, however, it describes an idea that seems increasingly unpopular and unsupported in our modern, politically-correct society. When seemingly racist, sexist, anti-Islamic or homophobic views are expressed, the main concern of our society so often seems to be about how the people who express these views can be silenced. On such occasions, few people today seem to be willing to step forward to promote the extremely important principle that, whatever the rights and wrongs of what was said, it is vitally important that people are allowed to express such views, regardless of how unpopular or bigoted they seem to be or might actually be.

Voltaire's belief was that there is something above even right and wrong - and that that something is freedom. It matters to have the freedom to have opinions - your own opinions, any opinions you like - and to be able to express those opinions, no matter how popular or unpopular they might be and regardless of how 'wrong' other people might believe them to be.

There are many people, however, who don't share this ideal. There are many countries where this ideal is not well known about - where such principles are not embedded in the culture. Even in a country like the UK, our familiarity with and understanding of this important concept is rapidly fading away. Increasingly, people see nothing wrong with taking the view that, 'You can't say that - because it's wrong!'

It's still popular for people to say they support freedom and freedom of speech - but the freedom to express your opinions so long as other people agree with you or so long as they don't consider your opinions to be 'unacceptable' or 'offensive,' is not real freedom of speech.

If we have principle and integrity, then we must be prepared to defend the freedom of speech of people we vehemently disagree with. When our society celebrates the right of people to express whatever racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Islamic opinions they wish - only then will we be living in an enlightened society that truly values our freedoms.