On 23 April the Centre for Policy Studies launched its report, Crossing the Threshold. It outlined how ‘there are now 266 powers allowing officials to enter a private home as of right.’ It was picked up by most papers.  An Englishman’s home, many told us, was no longer his castle.

The same day saw an extensive article in the Independent, reviewing 10 years of Tony Blair. It, too, focused on the threat to historic British liberties, this time through omnipresent surveillance, proposals for ID cards and a national database, the almost innumerable laws passed over the last decade…

Now that it is so difficult getting serious news items about dragons into the press, our St George’s Day coverage has to make do with castles and ancient British liberties.

Not that the stories ended with the day, of course. Articles about the intrusion of the state and the erosion of personal liberty are as common a feature of life as the CCTV cameras that watch us and, in Middlesbrough, scold and shame those seen to be misbehaving.

Shallower analyses trot out Big Brother clichés and claim the UK government has sinister totalitarian intent. The more thoughtful recognise that there is a real problem with low-level crime and incivility that government cannot afford to ignore.

But can it also afford to tackle it? What is the cost to a nation if its government tries to order social and cultural mores as well as political processes?

‘We are at sea without social norms,’ wrote Jenni Russell in the Guardian recently, ‘and yet who's to decide them?’  Fifty, even 25 years ago, the answer would have been obvious: the Church. Suggest that today and you are liable to be accused of cloaking an attempt to cling on to the vestiges of power and privilege under some guff about the common good.

And yet the great hope of the modern, liberal imagination – that private choice can replace public good and enable us all to live happy, independent lives free from the tyranny of others’ supposed moral authority – is crumbling in the parks and town centres, on the trains and buses around us.

With ecclesiastical authority in the realm of civil life all but gone, government initiatives try to fill the void. Nobody, however, from the CPS to Independent columnists, seems particularly enthused at the prospect of this.

Ultimately, few of us actually want to live in a castle, fortified against the dragons we perceive to roam our streets. Yet, without some renegotiation between public good and private choice, and with it a re-evaluation of the source, legitimacy and function of moral authority, the age of castles and dragons may yet be with us again.