The erosion of liberty is especially insidious because it happens by barely perceptible degrees. As a resident of Edinburgh, I was always able to park in the wide streets surrounding the city’s lovely Botanical Gardens for nothing (congestion is not and never has been a problem). No longer. Now you have to pay. And the council has compounded its folly by defacing those fine, tree-lined boulevards with lots of white lines and ugly street furniture. This is a monstrous imposition and I am incandescently annoyed about it. But it’s done and will never be undone.Time was too when you could fetch up to a football match as a free citizen, pay at the gate and go in. How quaint! Now you have to produce a biometric passport and undergo a criminal record check.

Well, not quite. But it now seems that any football supporter is a potential criminal and must expect to be treated as such. Today I tried to buy a ticket to watch my team – Leeds – play at Southend, only to be told by a most apologetic telephonist that I can’t have one because I am not personally known to any Southend supporter already registered with the club (the ‘away’ end is full). It’s being played on Friday night, by the way, to dissuade the mongol hordes of the West Riding from travelling down to sack the resort on Saturday afternoon.

The good burghers of coastal Essex have had a narrow escape. Being a son of the Broad Acres, I was planning to fetch along the most vicious of my many whippets, bash the locals over the head with an empty bottle of Tetley’s mild and bitter, and throw my clogs on to the pitch in the event of the home team scoring a goal. Now I shall have to content myself with the consolation of Yorkshire pud and the dripping jar ‘for us tea’ and the radio commentary.

Ok, I’m making a facetious fuss about nothing very much, but that’s the point. The little things accrete until they become a very big thing indeed. At Leyton Orient last year I managed to get a ticket, only to be met with a stern warning in the ground that I would be ejected were there to be any demonstrable evidence that I was not a home supporter. So, naturally, when Leeds scored a penalty, I jumped up to applaud the goalkeeper’s gallant attempt to save it. A friend of mine employed the same tactic on the North Bank at Highbury in the old days. Whenever Leeds scored against the home team (an infrequent occurrence, I freely admit) he’d jump up and loudly berate the Arsenal defenders while punching the air.

I’m drifting off the point, which is this. What are the limits of preventive policing and have those limits already been extended too far? There has been no serious trouble at a Leeds United away game for 20 years.

The last time I went to a home game at Elland Road I was filmed by a police cameraman entering and leaving the ground. Why? What right do they have to monitor, and if they so choose interfere with, my right of free assembly?

There are far more egregious examples of such abuses than my mildly discomfiting experiences. Last year 80 football supporters from Stoke were issued with a Section 27 order under the Violent Crime Reduction Act by the Manchester police, forced on to buses and escorted back to Stoke by police without being allowed to see a match with Manchester City. There had been no complaint about their behaviour. A group of equally blameless supporters from Plymouth Argyle were prevented from seeing a match at Doncaster, forcibly put on coaches and escorted across three police areas by vehicles and a helicopter.

As the campaigning journalist Henry Porter has written, the Football Supporters' Federation has been campaigning for police restraint in the use of Section 27, which allows police to issue dispersal notices to groups whom they believe ‘may cause trouble’. But why was such an outrageous affront to personal liberty allowed onto the statute book in the first place? Were MPs asleep, or busy fiddling their expenses?

On this 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two, that famous VE day cartoon by Philip Zec is brought to mind. It’s the one that depicts a wounded soldier handing over a laurel representing victory and freedom in Europe, the caption read ‘Here you are. Don't lose it again!’.

But we are losing it, bit by bit and day by day, aren’t we?