Nick Cohen

Lord Denning was perhaps the most beloved judge of the 20th century. He even inspired a Lord Denning Appreciation Society. But I and many others found something sinister behind his charming Hampshire accent. We noticed that his professed concern for the victims of injustice never extended to the victims of police fit-ups. In 1980, he heard an appeal by the Birmingham Six, the men falsely convicted for the IRA’s massacre of drinkers in two Birmingham pubs in November 1974. The six were suing the police for damages for the beatings they said they had received. Although it was not a full appeal, Denning understood the implications, and rejected the claim: 'Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial ...

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman friend. He saw on the news that snow had closed Robin Hood Airport and tweeted to his friends, “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed.

I have worried about Hugh Grant's understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn't being naïve about the likelihood of politicians or politicised bureaucrats seizing the opportunity to censor. ‘The phrase that is always used is 'don't throw the baby out with the bath water'. I have always said I don't think it is that difficult to tell what is bath water and what is a baby. To most people it is pretty obvious.’ 'Is it really, comrade?' I thought to myself. It seems to me that it depends where the red lines are drawn and who is doing the drawing.

In the last few years lawyers have begun to gush about the ‘Sumption effect’. They were not thinking of Jonathan Sumption QC’s fine legal mind — which was of such a quality that the Supreme Court elevated him straight from the Bar to a seat on the highest court in the land. Nor were they praising his history of the Hundred Years’ War, a conflict of such violence and duplicity that perhaps only an English lawyer could do justice to it. Rather, his peers gazed on his wealth in wonder, and hoped that his riches would flow into their pockets too. Sumption had collected about £7 million for representing Roman Abramovich in his fight with Boris Berezovsky.

The case of Adrian Smith, the Christian the Trafford Housing Trust demoted for politely expressing his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook, is one of the most disgraceful I have come across. Much will be written about the contempt for freedom of speech and conscience Mr Smith's po-faced and prod-nosed employers showed. Mr Justice Briggs was clearly upset that legal technicalities prevented him from giving Smith more money. 'I must admit to real disquiet about the financial outcome of this case. Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to a non-managerial post with an eventual 40 per cent reduction in salary.

If you want to understand the mood of modern Britain, James Hawes’s novels of middle class fury are not a bad place to start. Hawes’s heroes are middle-aged men, whose dreams have collapsed. They want the nice, “normal” middle-class homes and secure jobs their parents received as a matter of course. But Britain is not offering them normal anymore. Normal is a foreign country to which they can never return. They are harried and broke. They work in dead end teaching jobs, as Hawes once did. Their homes are in rundown streets, where they must pay vast amounts of money to live in a pokey dump. The moral of Hawes’s stories is that the puritan virtues of hard work and thrift offer no chance of escape.

A love for freedom of the press inspired Milton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, Mill and Orwell. Ringing declarations of the right of citizens to read and write what they choose have run through constitutions and charters of liberties. Modern Britain being the way it is, however, the lofty rhetoric of the past has sunk to debates about celebs and breasts. Specifically, the breasts on page three of The Sun, and the tits who publish them. Evan Harris, tribune of the Hacked Off campaign, makes a plausible argument that an effective press regulator could ban page three girls. After Lord Justice Leveson hears all the evidence of mass wrongdoing by journalists, he is likely to recommend a media authority that would treat journalists as if they were professionals akin to doctors or lawyers.

In my Observer column today, I talk about the scourging of Britain’s failed elite. To give readers an idea of how many institutions are in the dock, I quote an extract from Piers Morgan’s diaries from the summer of 2004. Because I have more space, I can give you the full ghastly detail here – what lucky people you are. Morgan's managers had just fired him from the editorship of the Mirror for running pictures of British soldiers pissing on Iraqi detainees, which a fool could have told him were crude fakes. There is a risk that when the pictures are seen in the Middle East they will endanger men and women in the forces. Morgan does not care. He toddles off to the 40th birthday party of Ross Kemp. Brown is there. Blunkett is there.

Corn dealers were the bankers of the early 19th century.  In the popular imagination, they were monsters who threatened the poor with starvation by inflating their prices to satiate their greed. The abused gentlemen, naturally, hated the opprobrium, while the authorities wondered whether agitators would spark food riots or revolution.

Another day and another unasked for letter asking me to live online. This time it is from my bank, NatWest – and yes, yes, thank you I know that by not moving my account to a reputable bank I am endorsing the pocket-lining incompetents who helped bring Britain to its knees, but as gleeful financiers say: bank customers are more likely to divorce than change banks. The heirs and successors to Fred Goodwin say they will now send me a bank statement once every three months instead of once a month. They will save on the cost of paper and postage if I agree, and I suppose that in the struggle to repay the billions they owe the taxpayer, NatWest believes that every little helps. NatWest clearly wants me wants to dispense with paper statements completely and sign up to Internet banking.