It was now the middle of May. The year 1935. Tension increased in the village as the news from Madrid grew more threatening and vague. To the peasants of Castillo, the visionary promises of February seemed to have dried up in the heat. There were strikes, parades, shows of proletarian force, boys and girls marching in coloured shirts, arms raised in salute, clenched fists and slogans, painted banners and challenging speeches.

When there was a strike it was total, enforced by the police and the fishermen picketed the sea. Rich old women dragged their laundry to the river, or queued up at the village wells. At the hotel the chambermaids sat gossiping in the sun while the chef stayed home with his wife; the guests slept in unmade beds.

Each day more peasants came in from the country, massing in the square to be on hand for trouble. Many of them brought guns slung over their shoulder, sticking out of their waistbands, or tied to the saddles of donkeys...flintlocks, pistols, and old rusty muskets which might have been saved from the Peninsular War.

The split village now emerged in clearer focus and its two factions declared themselves, confronting each other at last in black and white...labelled for convenience Fascist or Communist. The Fascists seemed ready to accept the name, this being what they aspired to, with the Falange already organized as a fighting group, a swaggering spearhead of upper-class vengeance, whose crude fascist symbols...Italian-inspired...were now appearing on walls and doorways.

The Communist label on the other hand was too rough and ready, a clumsy reach-me-down which properly fitted no one. The farm labourers, fishermen and handful of industrial workers all had local but separate interests. Each considered his struggle to be far older than Communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.

In fact I don’t remember meeting an official Communist in Castillo...though communism was a word in the bars. Manolo, who was a leader, had no political status at all, but was a Romantic Anarchist of his own invention. The local flag of revolution was the republican flag, the flag of the elected government. The peasants strung it like a banner across the Town Hall balcony and painted their allegiance beneath it in red: ‘We swear to defend this bandera with the last drop of our blood.’ Sombre and ominous words.

Yet the government they supported must have seemed remote to many, composed entirely of middle-class politicians...without a Communist, Anarchist, or a Socialist anywhere in its cabinet. The peasants looked to this government because their hopes lay with it, hopes they thought to realize for the first time in centuries, an opportunity to shift some of the balances which had so long weighed against them, more than anyone else in Europe.

Spain was a wasted country of neglected land...much of it held by a handful of men whose vast estates had scarcely been reduced or reshuffled since the days of the Roman Empire. Peasants could work this land for a shilling a day for a third of the year then go hungry. It was this simple incongruity they hoped to correct; this and a clearing of the air, perhaps some return of dignity, some razing of the barriers of ignorance which still stood as high as the Pyrenees.

A Spanish schoolmaster in 1935 knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk.

Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church...credulity, guilt and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning. All this could be brought about now by an act of their government and the peaceful process of law. There was nothing to stop it. Except for the powerful minority who would rather the country first bled to death.

June came in full blast, with the heat bouncing off the sea as from a buckled sheet of tin. All day in the bars the radios spat and crackled...violence in Valencia, strikes and riots in Barcelona. That morning a group of Falangists in the neighbouring village walked into a bar and shot five fishermen. The murderers, wearing arm-bands, escaped in a car to Granada. Castillo lay silent, like a shuttered camp.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country with Jacobo. Daylight nightingales were singing by the river. The air was brassy, thunderous, and only a thread of brown water ran trickling down the river bed. Some girls we knew had been gathering poppies in the field, and now they came down the path towards us, walking slowly in the heat, the red flowers wilting at their breasts, looking as though their bodies had been raked by knives.

An hour or so later we returned by another path and found two children standing under the bridge. They stood stiffly, holding hands, staring at the figure of a man who lay sprawled on the river bank. We recognised him as a local Falangist, a boy of about twenty, whose father had once been mayor. he had been shot through the head, and lay staring back at the children, flies gathering around his mouth.

The posing of some global menace to curtail civil rights and justify repressive laws is the oldest game in the book. And no government plays the game better than New Labour. Already the English are the most-watched people in the world with 4 million CCTV cameras...one for every fourteen people...perched like steel crows above roads, towns and city centres.

By the end of the year all our car journeys will be monitored using a network of speed cameras and automatic number plate recognition technology. Processing capacity will be fifty million plates a day and even though the system was devised to catch drivers without tax and insurance all car movements will be stored for six years. No doubt it has been designed to read Chinese number plates so we can develop an export capability.

When the police started filming demonstrations ten years ago it caused outrage. Now it is routine...and nobody bats an eyelid. We don’t even wave and shout ‘Hello Mum!’ any more. Children stopped by the police can have their DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.

When the National Identity Card Scheme is made law their parents will join them...after paying £300 each for compulsory cards that store biometric data and contain radio frequency chips to eventually enable authorities to scan crowds of demonstrators for names and addresses. It does not take a tyrannical government to deprive us of freedom.

The current demand is for anybody taken into custody to be charged. But this is being rendered meaningless by catch-all formulations that allow everybody to be charged with something. When the 82 years old Walter Wolfgang shouted ‘Nonsense!’ during a Labour Party Conference he was arrested and held under anti-terrorism legislation. Had he shouted it twice he could have been charged under the Protection from Harassment Act...designed to target stalkers.

The Stalker Legislation was used to arrest an animal rights protestor who sent two polite emails to a drug company executive; to prosecute two peace campaigners at Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill military intelligence base for causing harassment, alarm or distress to American servicemen with their ‘George W. Bush? Oh dear!’ placard; and to convict six Lancaster University students for aggravated trespass when they handed out leaflets to staff attending a seminar organised by Shell, GSK, BAE and DuPont on how to commercialise university research.

Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 all criminal offences...no matter how minor...are arrestable. And residents now face fines of up to £100 for a range of misdemeanours including discarding cigarettes on the streets, tapping ash from the end of a cigarette....there was a case in the newspapers today...putting rubbish bins out on the wrong day and failing to stifle car alarms.

But Section 132 is probably the best of the bunch. While the Incitement to Religious Hatred clause was taking all the flak, Section 132 banning all spontaneous protests in any area designated by government slipped silently through under the radar.

Ironically when the police tried Section 132 on Peace Campaigner Brian Haw...living on a traffic island outside the Houses of Parliament for the past five years...it failed because his protest had preceded the new law...although it eventually went through on appeal.

The House of Lords probably felt sorry for his four eviction attempts, three broken noses...dished out by an English woman, a US Marine from the US Embassy and an Israeli Stupidity Operative...two arrests and one divorce and decided he deserved to join the partridge in her pear tree.

The Dutch-based retailer Spar has nine stores in India and is looking to sign up five franchise partners to expand across the country. It also hopes to expand in Russia where it has plans to increase its current 40 stores to 100 in two regions by the end of the year. In China the success of Carrefour has started a debate about the adverse impact on domestic retailers...particularly smaller family-run groceries...of the foreign invasion. But Spar claims to be different.

Spar projects an ethos of embracing small family-run grocery stores by inviting them to join the club by signing up for the national or provincial Spar franchise. Retailers like Wal-Mart or Tesco enter China, India or Russia when they see a fast-growing middle class with enough disposable income to start focusing on brand, safety, quality and taste and less on price. There will be a few vague attempts to talk about branding & productivity and the economies of scale as if there were no diminishing returns. But in essence the enterprise is a looting operation whose principal purpose is to take out ever higher prices and repatriate ever larger profits. Is Spar really any different?

State and provincial bureaucrats and politicians in China, India and Russia may have done their homework before inviting in the foreign food retailers. But local people are well advised to talk to people in Marlow...where Waitrose has been stopped from expanding...or Sheringham...where Tesco has been stopped dead in its tracks...before going along with it. A walk to the seaside with Mr Ghandi is a nice way to spend a week or so. And when food is in short supply it is nice...for some...to know that small local farmers will go to the wall and the poor will starve when food distribution is under the control of foreign food stores. But who actually invited Colonialism in by the back door?

It is the summer of 1935 and Laurie Lee has been told that street-fiddlers in the Spanish town of Vallodolid need a licence. So off he goes after breakfast to the city hall where soldiers with fixed bayonets sat around on the stairs and hungry dogs ran in and out like messengers while the usual motionless queues of silent peasants waited for officials who would never appear. Doubting that there would be a queue for fiddlers that morning he climbed the stairs and opened the first door he came to. Let the young English tramp take up the story.

The room inside was large and crowded with heavy presidential furniture. At a desk by the window sat a reed-thin man...or rather he inclined himself parallel to it, his feet on a cabinet, a cigar in his mouth, and a chessboard across his knees. I could see his long hooked profile and one pensive downcast eye. He moved a few pawns, hummed a little and then swung his chair towards me. I was aware of two raised eyebrows and an expression of courtly inquiry. ‘You are lost, perhaps?’ ‘I’d like to see the Mayor,’ I said. ‘So would I. So would all the world.’ ‘Is he away?’

The man giggled, and a convulsion ran up his body like an air-bubble up a spout. ‘Yes, he’s away. He’s gone to the madhouse.’ I said I was sorry, but he raised his hand. ‘Oh no. He is happy. Who wouldn’t be in such a place? Biscuits and chocolate at all hours of the day. Nuns to talk to, and coloured wool to play with...at least, so they say.’ he looked secretively at his cigar. ‘But you see me here. If I can help...’

When I told him what I wanted, he gave a musical squeak and his eyebrows jumped with pleasure. ‘How charming,’ he murmured. ‘But of course you shall. One moment - Manolo, please!’ A swarthy young man, dressed in trousers and pyjama-top, entered softly from another room. ‘Find me a licence, Manolito.’ ‘What kind of licence?’ ‘Oh, any kind. Only make it a nice one.’ ‘Then permit me, Don Ignacio.’ The young man grasped his chief by the legs, hoisted them from the cabinet, and searched the papers beneath them. Meanwhile Don Ignacio reclined indolently, his legs stuck in the air, beaming upon me and singing ‘rumpty-dum-diddle’.

‘To sell water,’ murmured the clerk. ‘To erect a small tomb...to beat gold...to press juniper berries...ah, here we have it. Don Ignacio, with your permission...’ He replaced his chief’s legs on the cabinet and handed him a kind of finely engraved cheque-book, together with pen and ink. Don Ignacio doubled up and began to write, rolling his tongue and grunting with effort. Delicate scrolls and decorations ran over the paper, feathery tendrils in violet ink; then the things was finished, dusted and sealed, and signed with a delicious flourish. ‘There,’ said Don Ignacio. ‘The city is yours. Rumpty-dum-diddle-de-ay.’ I studied my licence and was pleased with it. It looked like a Royal Charter.

Headed with an engraving of lions and a scarlet seal, it formally proclaimed: ‘That, by using the powers attributed to and conferred upon the Mayorality, and by virtue of the precepts of the Municipal Bye-laws and the appropriate tariffs due to the said most excellent Ayuntamiento; a licence is hereby granted to Don Lorenzo Le, that he may walk and offer concerts through the streets of this City, and the public squares of the same, provided always that he does not in any manner cause riot, demonstrations or prejudice the free movement of traffic and persons...’

‘That will be half a peseta,’ said Don Ignacio mildly, swinging his feet back on to the top of the desk. Then he invited me to join him in a game of chess, the question of the fee was forgotten.