Sir Alan Moses starts work this morning as chairman of the new Independent Press Standards Organisation IPSO and promises that it will not be “a sham.” Indeed it is not a sham: it is a political quango set up in response to campaigns by Hacked Off and Guardian journalists to abolish our free press. This must not be allowed to happen. The health of the nation depends upon the freedom of the press. Even that old Puritan John Milton understood this and argued vigorously in its defence in his 1644 speech, later printed as Areopagitica. Muzzling the press is the first act of all tyrannies. Just reflect on states such as the USSR under Stalin, Germany under Hitler and China ruled by Mao and his successors. Look at any dictatorship you fancy and ask yourself whether you would prefer to live there or here in Britain, with all its faults.

Newspapers are a pretty untidy business and actually their methods of news-gathering are often despicable. But not as despicable as the methods of all governments which control the mass media. These governments are thereby enabled to hide their own misdeeds and criminalise public scrutiny. The freedom of the press is what guarantees our liberty – or at least some measure of freedom. The free press can hold governments to account and this is ever more necessary given our current debased and corrupt political class.

There should be absolutely no regulation of the press. This does not mean that the papers and the broadcasters can do as they like. They must be subject to the law of the land as everyone else is so subject. If I break into your house, or even if by my words and writings slander you or libel you, then I have committed an offence and for which I can be arraigned. The same goes for journalists, newspapers and television companies.

There are enough laws and we don’t need further regulation. Control always works in favour of authority. Yes, and the basis of all authority is freedom.

Are you in the mood for love first thing in the morning? Evan Davis and Harriet Harman were on the Today Programme at 7.45 today. My, what a torrid affair it was too! Forget Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, the love affair between the BBC and the Labour Party is truly enduring. Sometimes lovers require a pretext for their trysts and today the ostensible occasion was the question of whether non-payment of the TV licence fee should be decriminalised. That was only the foreplay. Hands on knees. The bumps-a-daisy soon followed. Harriet explained tenderly that the licence fee “guarantees the BBC’s independence from government.” As an engaged lover, Evan was too kind to ask the obvious question, “Well, then, darling, who or what guarantees the independence of ITV, SKY or any other of the myriad commercial channels which regularly manage to criticise governments while lacking the financial cushion of what amounts to a tax?”

As this rude question went all unasked, it had to go all unanswered. Evan merely moved the cushion, so to speak,

He asked Harriet why Labour was under a cloud following its recent set-back in the polls. When dealing with Harriet (or any of her sisters – and brothers in the Labour Party) Evan is never anything other than gentle. His soft imploring gave Harriet the perfect opportunity to say that Labour was not at all under a cloud and that indeed, given the stirring leadership of Ed Miliband, all was working for the best in the best of all possible parties.

This was the climax of their love scene and it subsequently faded. But never fear, it will be revived again…and again…and again, The passion of our two lefty lovers is insatiable – and of course all their trysts are paid for out of our taxes

Is it Innocents’ Day every day now? Do we learn nothing from experience? Michael Buerk was on Radio Four this morning advertising this evening’s edition of The Moral Maze and he asked what had happened to the idea of morality in politics: do we no longer have a commitment to the spread of democracy and instead consider only our own national interest?

But the notion that politics and policies should be based on abstract principles and systems is one which was born in Enlightenment Whiggery and greatly strengthened by the secular dogmas of socialism and Marxism. Eliot famously criticised this view of how we should conduct ourselves when he mocked “men dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” For the truth is that not only should we avoid this intrusion of the notions of principle and abstract ideas into places where they don’t belong but, as matter of fact, such principles, ideas and theories never have guided the policies and politics of the nations. Nations and peoples tend to act in their interests – and a good thing too.

For there is a multitude of conflicting principles and these provoke conflicts which are avoidable and quite unnecessary. The idea of democracy has got too big for its boots and become our obsession, which is a wholly bad thing, not least because the word” democracy” is never clearly defined; and it is everywhere employed as a slogan, a shibboleth, as a secularised religious commandment. And the view of what constitutes democracy is excessively simplistic. In the realm of public discussion and media comment it always means nothing more than turning up at elections and meetings, counting heads and doing what the majority voted for. This is worse than simplistic: it is unjust. Even John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty understood that democracy concerns respect for the views of minorities. Suppose a controversial motion – say to ban hunting with hounds – is proposed and carried by a majority, what then becomes of respect for the views of those dissenting? In our system, they are ridden over, roughshod; they become, as it were, non-persons. This is not democracy, but tyranny. The issue becomes even more unjust in cases where the vote is a narrow one.

Democracy has thus become the dictatorship of superior numbers.

The organic, traditionally conservative view, the opposite of Whiggery and of this simplistic and unjust notion of democracy, is that our freedoms in society – what C.H. Sisson described as “a decent set of political liberties” – are preserved by a much more subtle interplay of forces. Public life is not formed and shaped by headcounts alone. We have national institutions: the law, the church, parliament, the university, the monarchy and we are what we are because we exist within them. The idea of the sovereign individual is not only divisive and malign: it is a delusion. For we are all shaped and formed by forces, events and conditions which are greater than the individual and beyond the individual’s control. Our parents. Our property. Our schooling. Our membership of all our voluntary institutions: the pub and the pie shop, the football match, the Lord’s Test, the Grand National, the Promenade Concerts. Before the comparatively recent demise of the Church of England, we should have mentioned the great Feasts and Fasts: Easter, Whitsunday, Ash Wednesday – and of course the correlative of the Church’s Year in the agricultural seasons, springtime and harvest. Now almost all we’re left with from the Church’s Year is the commercial Christmas and that, for good or ill, has become part of the democracy which shapes our lives. I am forgetting the revived pagan superstition of the vast – and expensive – communal celebration of the New Year. Among the lesser feasts and fasts, I’m afraid we now have to include such ersatz displays of public vulgarity as Valentine’s Day (the prefix “Saint” long since removed). Fathers’ Day and Halloween. It is worth pausing to note that our secularised society does not celebrate 1st November (All Saints) but 31st October (Halloween). Thus good is ignored and evil acknowledged. Other banalities float across from the USA and there is a growing observance of something called Groundhog Day – coincidentally 2nd February the ancient Feast of Candlemas.

It is not only a fact that politics and policies are about interests: it is right that they should be so. We are not abstractions, intellectual counters in a game whose rules are a sort of French Political Calculus. We are flesh and blood, bodies, parts and passions. We are embodied. The significant word is “incarnate.” We are creatures, and creatures have interests. A man eats when he’s hungry and a woman drinks when she’s dry. A nation goes to war either for the gains of conquest or for defence and self-preservation.

These are the tangible realities by the side of which modern notions of democracy are only so much hot air. 

All that we are as individuals and as a nation is summed up in one line: “God save the Queen!” He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.