I have to ‘fess up to being a freedom of speech fundamentalist. Personally I’d be in favour of a British equivalent to the first amendment. Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech? Sounds good to me.

But having been a working journalist for nearly 20 years, I am well aware that there are plenty of rules about what people can say in the UK.

There are the libel laws, for a start. Contrary to popular belief, bloggers do not enjoy any immunity. Oliver Kamm has already fought off one libel action from Neil Clark, at his own expense. Clark has in the past said nice thing about my book. Kamm hasn't. Nevertheless, my sympathies in the matter are entirely with Oliver.

Personally, I have lost a libel case in the Greek courts, with a six figure Euro-denominated fine ultimately footed by my employer’s libel insurance. That was before the bill from Carter Ruck & Co, who let’s just say don’t come cheap.

So rest assured, I will resist the temptation to write anything on Dave’s Part that isn’t covered by justification, privilege or fair comment. Call me a wuss. I just don’t care.

But libel laws are just the start. There are a plethora of other limitation, from D-Notices to the Race Relations Act and New Labour’s recent decision to outlaw what it defines as ‘incitement to religious hatred’.

It’s not that I don’t realise that incitement to religious hatred is a bad thing. Incitement to any kind of hatred is clearly a bad thing. But this legislation was simply unnecessary. Incitement to violence is already an offence. Anything short of that – even if it is uttered by the British National Party - should not be.

Finally, I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists since 1988. The NUJ operates a binding code of conduct, which can be read here. I will observe it fully while writing this blog.

Basically, this is institutionalised self-censorship. All entirely voluntary, old chap. Little notes like this one are part of the reason readers often do not get the full story:

ADVISORY - NOT FOR PUBLICATION:

Andrew Vallance
Air Vice-Marshal
Secretary, Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee

Astonishing, isn’t it? Assuming that any terrorists or foreign intelligence agencies are for any reason interested in the identities of the two spooks, all they have to do is walk into the Stationery Office and buy a copy of the Stevens report. It will probably even be available for download.

But information that Vallance himself admits is ‘widely available in the public domain’ won’t be featuring in the British press.

This is the fifth attempt since 2003 to get this particularly noxious piece of legislation onto the statute books. The Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General are clearly ‘never say die’ kind of guys.

Fortunately, the Lords – that standing insult to democracy that most of the left would either put on an elected footing or scrap altogether, remember? – will almost certainly curb yet another authoritarian initiative from the government and throw the damn thing out.

And then? And then Lord Falconer - pictured left - and Lord Goldsmith will wait until just before the summer recess, invoke the Parliament Act, and impose the law anyway.

The justification for the move is that the average random selection of 12 good men and true are too thick to understand the complexities at issue in a major fraud trial.

Supporters point to such fiascos as the acquittal of the Maxwell brothers, the three Guiness trials, and most recently – in March 2005 – the collapse of the Jubilee Line fraud trial after two years.

But it is clear in the latter case that the ability of the jury to grasp the essentials at stake were not the issue. The blame can largely be laid at the door of the defence team and the way it presented the evidence, as a subsequent investigation by the Crown Prosecution Service admitted.

You can read a summary of the findings here. In no way does the evidence offer any justification whatsoever for curtailing the vital protections the government is manifestly so keen to take away.

Of course, defendants in major fraud trials will be - almost by definition - major league businessmen and women of the fat cat stripe. It’s tempting to argue that the left should favour anything that makes it easier to bang up suits. After all, they have to be guilty of something.

Tempting, but wrong. If New Labour succeeds in abolishing trial by jury for one class of offences, the only question is which class of offences will be next, and which class of offences will be the next after that.

It can’t be that long before we run out of civil liberties for New Labour to crack down on. The three successive Blair administrations have effectively torn up the Geneva Convention on refugees, and repeatedly contravened the substance and spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.

House arrest, arbitrary and punitive deportation, a shoot to kill policy on the streets of London? New Labour has flirted with them all. Even where it has been knocked back – Blair’s first defeat in the Commons came over his attempt to introduce detention without charge for up to 90 days – the government just keeps coming back for more:

Home Secretary John Reid has outlined a raft of proposals to toughen counter terror laws - including reviewing the 28-day limit on pre-charge detention.

Plans also include a sex offender-style terrorist register, and a review into courts using intercept evidence.

Although Reid will not confirm it, the likelihood is that the Brown administration will seek a second bite at the 90 day detention cherry. That would be tantamount to the introduction of internment without trial by any other name, in a manner clearly targeted at ethnic minorities.

Civil libertarians among us now have to rely on the likes of David Davis – yes, that’s right, hard right Tory leadership contender David Davis – to point out that such measures are indeed ‘draconian’.

Just because a law is labelled ‘anti-terror legislation’ that does not mean it will actually succeed in preventing any terrorism. Victims so far have including an old man heckling at Labour Party conference, people guilty of the heinous offence of wearing T-shirts carrying anti-Blair slogans, and some young Indian guy denied the chance to board his flight after a taxi driver grassed him up for listening to the Clash on his iPod.

Will they now run the risk of ending up on New Labour’s ‘sex offender-style terrorist register’ too? And what good will a ‘sex offender-style terrorist register’ do anyway, other than act as a direct incitement to lynch law by tabloid instigation?

And are we really saying that the current security situation is today more perilous than it was in either of two world wars or the cold war? If not, these pernicious proposals should be immediately interned for an indefinite period.

Among the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech today is an Employment Bill that will reportedly enable trade unions to expel members on grounds of their allegiance to a political party.

It comes after the European Court of Human Rights earlier this year overruled British legislation, dating from 1992, that prevented train drivers’ union Aslef from kicking out a British National Party activist.

In principle, voluntary organisations in civil society have every right to decide who they wish to have on their books and who they don’t. Fascists clearly have no place in the labour movement.

But it strikes me that there are obvious dangers with the proposed new law from a civil liberties perspective. It all depends on the wording of the relevant clauses, I suppose.

Could we see a situation where general secretaries are allowed bureaucratically to exclude internal opponents who belong to Marxist groups, for instance? And if so, shouldn't we flatly oppose the Bill?

But the man widely regarded as one of the world’s leading moderate Muslim clerics openly argues that it is permissible for husbands to beat their wives and that gays should be killed, and let’s just say that I remain enough of a wimpish liberal to have one or two difficulties with this.

That al Qaradawi lays down strictly circumscribed conditions for smacking up the missus if she is giving you gyp – remember, guys, you can’t use whips, sticks or boards, and the punishment isn’t suitable if you think the chick will only get off on it – strikes me as of but marginal relevance.

Apparently, he isn’t clear on whether homosexuals should be stoned to death or thrown off the top of tall buildings; but however he slices the Qur’an on this one, it isn’t going to endear him to anybody who thinks that gay rights represent more than a shibboleth.

By the way, in the same interview, he opines that heterosexual ‘fornicators’ should suffer equivalent punishment. Many of us will have to declare an interest here.

But does any of the above amount to sufficient grounds on which to deny him a visa to enter Britain for medical treatment, which the government has done today? Even being the miserable Islamophobe I clearly am, I think not.

Remember, Britain was happy enough to allow the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – a man who ordered the death of 3,000 people - to come to Harley Street for that exact same reason. Sadly, Jack Straw even let him out again.

More recent guests in this country have included King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, head of the wonderful petro-kleptocracy that presides over the public beheadings in Chop Square. Indeed, he is such a vital customer for BAE Systems that he even merited Her Majesty’s company for a coach ride to Buckingham Palace. Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf also qualified for the state visit treatment.

If David Cameron is going to get so exercised about ‘preachers of hate’ being allowed into this country, he should remember that French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has sometimes crossed the Channel to address rightwing pressure groups that include Conservative Party members.

Al Qaradawi isn’t seeking to come to London to buy billions of pounds worth of jet fighters, or even popping over for a quick spot of rabble-rousing; he wants to see a doctor. If that's OK for retired caudillos, why shouldn't it be OK in this instance?

The question of how far society should tolerate the intolerant is one of the oldest saws in political theory. But this time at least, al Qaradawi should be extended his human rights, even if he militates against the extension of human rights to others.

I MAY or may not spend time on the internet looking for pix of hot Asian teens, downloading Bible study podcasts, shopping for cheap Viagra, posting on discussion forums devoted to rhythm & blues or – when accuracy is absolutely essential for journalistic purposes - checking out the hard facts on Wikipedia. But clearly my surfing habits should be for me to know, and not for Jacqui Smith to find out

Like all 14 year old boys, I had to suffer the indignity and embarrassment of having my mum rumble the stash of pornos hidden under my mattress. The home secretary has got no right to make me feel like that again.

After all, I am now a grown up. I pay Virgin £17.99 a month from my post-tax income, and am accordingly entitled to full access to whatever filth, depravity, lunatic conspiracy theory, finely honed polemic or government propaganda is out there in cyberspace, without this being recorded for posterity.

It’s none of the state’s business if I wish to watch footage of mature BBWs doing unfeasible things with vegetables, catch up on the latest announcements from the Belarus department of central planning, or even – promise not to tell anyone? - go to www.respectrenewal.org.

On general libertarian principle, therefore, the government’s plans to keep a record of every single phone call made, every last text message and email sent, and each website visited by everyone in Britain will be implacably opposed by all right-thinking people everywhere.

We already live in a country with the most CCTV cameras in the world and a four million strong DNA database that contains details of thousands of UK residents who have committed no crime. I am being entirely serious when I say that I cannot thing of a single state in history that has possessed technology with such obviously repressive potential.

Moreover, the government is determined to force through such tried-and-tested traditional dictatorship faves as ID cards and de facto internment in the form of 42-day detention without charge.

Sure, it is entirely legit for the cops and the spooks to keep tabs on jihadi talkboards and kiddie fiddler picture exchanges and maybe one or two other categories of website that don’t immediately spring to mind. But that’s about it.

Given the mindnumbing banality of 99% of the billions upon billions of texts sent every day - ‘not sure if turned off iron’, ‘luv u lots!@!!’ and ‘need anyfing from shops?’ – it is highly doubtful that keeping them on file for up to a year takes the GWoT any further forward.

Anyway, only the most stupid al Qa’eda operative would use his own PC or phone for a crucial communication. That’s what nicked mobiles and internet cafes are for.

Or put it another way; if those bastards ever do get their hands on a genuine weapon of mass destruction, it isn’t likely to be because they were able to snap one up cheaply on eBay, is it?