And yet one part of the old establishment is growing in power and using its muscle to overturn the gains made since the 1960s. With an aristocratic prejudice against freedom of speech for the masses and freedom for the press the masses read, the judiciary is imposing costs and sanctions on journalism which would be hard enough to endure in the best of times, but are unbearable now that the recession and the internet are destroying the media's business models.

I am sorry if this sounds a touch Marxist, but the judiciary is engaged in a class war and a political project. The class element ought to be obvious. The Sutton Trust, which seeks to improve educational opportunities for young people from non-privileged backgrounds, reported this year that after a small decline in their influence the public schools were regaining their grip on the law. Seven of the 10 leading judges, 68 per cent of leading barristers and 55 per cent of partners in the top law firms went to public school. Old schools and new money meet as the judiciary and London's extraordinarily aggressive solicitors use the law of libel and a privacy law they have virtually invented to protect the wealthy from scrutiny.

All over the world, free men and women — and, more disgracefully, men and women who are struggling to be free — are finding that English judges are claiming the right to censor their work and empty their bank accounts.

Conservatives complain about the "liberal judiciary". But their behaviour shows that the judges are not true liberals but the successors to the Whigs of pre-democratic Britain. William Hazlitt defined a Whig as "a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two." The judges show how the duplicity Hazlitt described survives. They defend the rights of defendants in the criminal justice system with admirable tenacity. However, when the citizen is not the prisoner of the state but is exercising his or her right to be a full participant in the deliberations of the state they shut him up. They subvert the right to freedom of speech protected by the first amendment of the American Constitution, sanctified by custom in Britain and enshrined in statute in the Human Rights Act, because they think the press should be like the BBC, another somewhat Whiggish institution. The press has never been and never wanted to be like the broadcasters. At its best, it produces investigative journalism the BBC would never dare broadcast. At its worst, it produces sexual pornography and the pornography of violence the BBC would never wish to show. The effect of judicial activism is to stifle the best and promote the worst. The reticence that covered the last minutes of Lesley Ann Downey has long gone as editors try to find a way of appealing to a mass audience that won't land them in court.

Writing about the courts presents many difficulties. The largest among them is not the risk of being sued yourself but the widespread notion in Britain that if you tell the truth, you have nothing to worry about. The enormous costs of freedom of speech actions make a nonsense of such naivety. Newspapers which are telling the truth prefer to surrender to the risk of receiving crippling bills. A legal director of a chain of regional newspapers told a recent meeting organised by Index on Censorship that this meant his editors never printed anything that might provoke a libel action, settling any claim regardless of the merits of the case.