Describing what must have a traumatic ordeal, Chloe Madeley said: "This week I was confronted by a man who said he was going to rape me. He didn't leap out, knife in hand, from a dark alleyway to issue the chilling threat. Instead, he cowered anonymously behind his computer screen and sent me the vile threat through Twitter. Insulting, threatening, violent — the words horrified me."

Labour MP Stella Creasy was another high-profile victim of rape threats when she backed a campaign to put Jane Austen on the new £10 note. Few would disagree that it is the job of the criminal law to tackle serious and credible threats of violence against Madeley, Creasy and others, whether those threats are made in person or online. But the law as it stands, let alone the law after Grayling's proposed reforms which hope to punish those who "troll" (a vaguely defined category of disturbing breadth), goes much too far, painting threats of violence and language that is merely offensive or insulting with the same brush.

The universal condemnation generated by the police's intrusion into Michael Abberton's life was harder to come by when Azhar Ahmed, a 20-year-old from West Yorkshire, reacted to the news of an improvised explosive device attack killing six British servicemen in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, by writing on Facebook that he thought "all soldiers should die and go to hell". This much less sympathetic character was charged under Section 127 (1) of the Communications Act 2003, which provides that a person is guilty of an offence if he "sends by means of a public electronic communication network a message or any other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". Ahmed was fined £300 and sentenced to 240 hours of community service.

Despite the relative silence after his conviction, Ahmed's case should be of concern to those interested in the preservation of free expression in Britain. Consider three statements made about Ahmed. The first is from a police spokesperson: "He didn't make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother." The second is the message of the 500 or so activists from the English Defence League and other far-right organisations protesting outside the court on the day of Ahmed's trial. Their placards read: "Jail those who insult our troops." The third is the warning issued by District Judge Jane Goodwin, who, when sentencing Ahmed, said: "With freedom of speech comes responsibility. On March 8 you failed to live up to that responsibility." Two sources are reputable, one utterly disreputable, yet their messages are disturbingly similar. However poorly Ahmed expressed his views, it would be hard to argue that his words were, at the core, anything other than political in nature. It would also be difficult to maintain that his words caused any harm beyond the offence taken by some of the great majority of us who disagree with him. Free speech, like other civil rights, is something that we are all entitled to, however unpopular our views may be. There is no quid pro quo, no "rights but only with responsibilities". If we take Judge Goodwin's warning to be an accurate representation of English law, the right to freedom of expression in Britain has become dangerously conditional.