Life After The State, a guest blog by Dominic Frisby18th November 2013

'Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman'. So wrote AJP Taylor as the opening lines of best-selling English History 1914–1945. 19th century Britain was indeed a much more free existence than that of today. You didn't need a passports (you could travel abroad without permission or ID), you could change money without restriction, taxes were paid on a modest scale (8% of