THE VERDICT is expected today in the Tommy Sheridan defamation trial, in which the MSP and former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party is suing the News of the World over allegations of extramarital sex, orgies and swinging parties. But the verdict on Britain’s libel laws should have been clear long ago.

They are the most atrocious, unjust pieces of legislation on our statute books — a title won in the face of some stiff competition. Nobody in his right mind, or who is still mad enough to believe in freedom of speech, should surely ever sue under these laws. Indeed, a society that considers itself free should abolish them.

English libel law commits crimes against natural justice (Scotland’s defamation laws are not much different). Forget the presumption of innocence; libel law presumes that the defendant has published lies and demands that he prove the contrary. The claimant has to prove nothing and can simply assert that his reputation has been damaged — in Scotland the claimant must show some damage, not necessarily financial. The vast majority of cases brought to court end in the claimant’ s favour. Most never get that far, because nervous publications settle beforehand, while the spectre of defamation law has a chilling effect on what gets published in the first place. No wonder “libel tourists” from Britney Spears to Russian businessmen sue foreign publications in UK courts.

And what of the winners? Last week Paul McKenna, the TV hypnotist, won a libel case against the Daily Mirror, which had described his PhD as “bogus” in a long-forgotten article. Mr McKenna said that the trial had made him “a laughing stock”. The judge ruled in his favour, but concluded that it would have been fair comment to say that Mr McKenna had received his qualification from an “obscure, degrees-by-post establishment”, and that “ hypnotherapy was not a suitable subject for a PhD”. What a triumph!

Mr Sheridan’s defamation case has turned into a media circus of colourful accusations and denials, during which he has wept, sacked his lawyers, paraded his personal life and offered to parade his hirsute body before the world, admitted being “a source of ridicule” and effectively accused 18 witnesses of lying. It has certainly altered the staid reputation of the SSP. What impact suing has on Mr Sheridan’s reputation remains to be seen.

A few years ago, I was sued for libel. The case left Living Marxism, the independent left-wing magazine that I edited, facing closure, and me facing a million-pound bill for costs and damages. I said on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice that the only thing the trial had proved beyond reasonable doubt was that the libel laws were a menace to free speech and a disgrace to democracy. Then, libel law was considered a rich man’s charter. Now, however, the rise of “no win, no fee” lawyers has “democratised” censorship and opened the doors of the defamation courts to others. Fashionable though it is to bash American tyranny, it is worth recalling that many of these high-profile cases would never come to trial there because the law makes it hard for public figures to sue. In 1997, a US court refused to enforce a judgment made in London, on the ground that UK libel law was “repugnant” to the principle of free speech. A good word, repugnant. And that was long before any discussion of Mr Sheridan’s body hair.

• SPEAKING of illiberal measures, what do these recent cases have in common: a trader fined £80 for causing “harassment, alarm and distress” by displaying a T-shirt with the slogan “B*****ks to Blair” in Norfolk; a Hampshire woman ordered by police to remove a “distressing, offensive and inappropriate” 34-year-old sign that read “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” from her garden gate; and the Lyme Regis Lifeboat Guild made to drop a “disrespectful” annual charity event that involved contestants hitting each other with a dead conger eel?

  Answer: each little crackdown followed a complaint from one person who claimed to have been offended. That something causes offence to a minority has been the best excuse for demanding censorship for sometime. Now it seems that the authorities have extended that anti-democratic attitude, to protect the feelings of “minorities” that constitute an individual. Sort of one man, one ban.

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