The other legal problem has been the right to determine crime slipping from the hands of the law into the eyes of the beholder. Ever since the Macpherson Report on the Metropolitan Police investgigation into the death of Stephen Lawrence, a hate crime can be deemed to have been a hate crime if the victim perceives it to have been so. Well-intentioned though it may have been, this move has further blended speech and action. Hate speech is now so wedded to hate crime that speech itself is tantamount to physical violence. The lady who reported Katie Hopkins to the police for commenting on her weight believed a crime had been committed against her person. Many religious and other minorities cause the police to investigate for precisely the same reason—that they have actually been injured by the remarks. Physical and psychological injury have been elided so that an attack on one's person and an attack on one's self-esteem might be deemed equally deserving of police attention.

Such badly-worded laws hang over us, but the sheer profusion of speech is what is undermining our free-speech traditions from below. Citizens and government are still struggling to work out what our approach to social media—a phenomenon which not only speeds up human interactions but removes what used to be its filters—ought to be. As anybody who has scrolled through an online comments thread will know, people interact on their computers and mobile phones with a bluntness, boldness and rudeness which if used in ordinary life would make any bus stop a warzone.

But the response to social media is indicative of the wider challenge we are going through. We now live in a society where we meet a greater variety of people on any high street than an 18th century anthropologist could have met in a lifetime. Combine that diversity and the resulting range of opinion with a speed and volume of communication unparalleled in human history and the view has emerged that something is going to have to give. There are those who believe—like Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who commissioned the 2005 Muhammad cartoons—that the more diverse your society becomes the more diversity of opinion you are going to have to cope with. But that does not appear to be the settling British consensus.

In Britain it seems to have been decided that the potential range of expression in a diverse society is unworkable and that as a result everyone must be encouraged to tone it down a bit. No less a figure than Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, used a speech in Oxford in February to argue for precisely this. Reflecting on events in Paris, Lord Woolf argued that freedom of thought, conscience and religion must be exercised "in a way which respects the sensitivities and needs of other individuals, groups or society as a whole. In other words, they should be exercised reasonably and in a manner that does not impinge disproportionately on the rights of others." Do not, in other words, draw a cartoon of Muhammad.

If free speech, and the arguments for it are muscles which must be exercised regularly, these are some of the reasons why Britain's response to its challengers have become so flabby of late. It is no surprise that we have failed the great test of free speech which started a decade ago with the Danish cartoons. It has been fought in Copenhagen and Paris but almost wholly avoided in London. Even Private Eye—the nearest approximation we have to a satirical magazine in Britain—has repeatedly sheltered behind "good taste" as its reason for not publishing cartoons of Islam's founder.