Freedom of speech is no longer a value. It has become a loophole exploited with impunity by trolls, racists and ethnic cleansing advocates. They are aided by the group I call useful liberals – the “defend to the death your right to say it” folk. The writer Mari Uyehara calls them the “free speech grifters”, those “who flog PC culture as a singularly eminent threat to the freedom of expression”. To them, the “what next?” argument foresees apocalyptic harm that might befall liberal values. It cares much less about speech we can link to violence, or that which compromises the safety of others.

Last Sunday Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League whose social media posts were cited repeatedly in the trial of the Finsbury Park terrorist Darren Osborne, gave the speech at Speakers’ Corner that would have been delivered by one of those denied entry – the Austrian Martin Sellner, a leader of the white supremacist group Generation Identity. Useful liberals have swallowed two freedom of speech myths whole: the redefinition of the term to encompass not only freedom from persecution but the right to a platform; and the delusion that freedom of speech is a neutral principle uncontaminated by history or social bias. There are hard choices here. Too often, those who should know better argue for the wrong ones. They fight to their deaths to defend the rights of Bachmann, Sellner and the other peddlers of hate – but not mine.