A dispiriting reading by Stephen Robinson in yesterday's Telegraph:

To mark Orwell's birthday, I rang around some of the people who have featured in The Daily Telegraph's Free Country campaign since we launched it two years ago. It seemed a good moment to conduct a sort of "freedom audit" and gauge if those who seek to stem the tide of government encroachment on our liberties are managing to hold the line. It was a depressing experience.

[...]

At the beginning of last year, letters and e-mails began pouring in from unpaid parish councillors around England, enraged at being required to sign up to a new Whitehall Code of Conduct and declare all their business dealings. It is when considering the "best practices" aspects of New Labour's "modernising agenda" that you pass through the looking glass into a world far weirder than anything Orwell could have imagined.

For the list of individual cases the Telegraph Free Country campaign has publicised or was involved in read the whole article.