However hard you try to push yourself to the top of the market, there will always be other newer, and maybe cheaper, destinations snapping at your heels. It’s a tiny island – 22 miles by 14 miles – but has been extremely successful in transforming its economy from reliance on sugar and other basic commodities into a tourist haven. Thus, British ministers are proud of the fact that the UK is not only the largest recipient of inward investment in the European Union but the second largest, after the United States, in the world. “Tax haven” is grubby, “inward investment” is squeaky-clean.
Now suppose, like me, you are in Barbados – not a particularly disagreeable thought at this time of year.

Any business that is run from a place like Liechtenstein or a Caribbean island immediately carries a taint. If it’s legit, why on earth is it being run from there?

Say the words “inward investment,” on the other hand, and the image is quite the reverse: it is a vote of confidence in the attractive business climate, the skilled workforce and the generally efficient economy. It is considerably more difficult to find and to secure in the new environment, but without that certainty the last century’s gains will mostly be swallowed up by that great Leviathan, the State, the commercial predators, and the press.. SAY THE words “tax haven” and all the accoutrements of sleaze spring to mind: brass name-plate companies, gin-soaked expats, rip-offs of investors, the late Robert Maxwell.

It depends what you do with it, where you go and above all whether modernisation means, at the end of the day, that this country is freer than it was before…”I disagree with his first point. Modernisation in terms of the electronic era is wonderful in its own right; an amazing advance of human knowledge. But he’s right on the renewed search for freedom within the sunrise world. Neither prospect is appealing: such targeted and precise, co- ordinated knowledge almost replaces freedom with externally induced predestination as our thoughts, actions and choices are prefigured for us.Individual freedom has, without doubt, been placed in severe jeopardy by the electronic developments of our time and yet the knowledge-led society is one where all of us can enjoy life-long learning, developing and understanding of much that was only accessible by older mechanisms to a select few.Michael Ignatieff puts the paradox most neatly in his explanation of what liberty should mean to individuals: “There’s nothing wonderful about modernity at all. Article F of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 included the substance of that Joint Declaration. With over a year’s debate in Parliament, Britain signed that also.