When the Government hired the services of an 11-year-old poet to sing the praises of the new Human Rights Act in 2000, few would have imagined that a few years later we would be left envying the freedoms enjoyed by 17th-century Englishmen. Weren't human rights supposed to protect us from arbitrary justice? Not if you are an 89-year-old woman cowering in her home while a bailiff batters down the door to seek payment of your absent son's unpaid parking fine, they don't.

That case is just one of the injustices that have come to light since the introduction of a clause buried inside the Victims of Crime and Domestic Violence Act 2004, giving bailiffs the right to break open the doors of debtors' homes. Not satisfied with that piece of legislation, the Government now wants to give bailiffs the right to push debtors from their doorways, drag them off their televisions and ease their grip on their children's dolls houses. The proposals are just a thugs' charter. Anyone can be a bailiff. There is such a thing as a “bailiff's certificate”, to obtain which budding bailiffs have to undertake minimal training and convince the courts that they are fit and proper people to go sniffing around debtors' houses.

But the certificate is only required for bailiffs who are collecting unpaid rent, motoring fines and council tax. As far as any other kind of debt is concerned, you can be finishing a jail sentence for manslaughter one day and be out battering down doors on behalf of a debt-collection agency the next. Neither is there anything to stop a bailiff adding his own extortionate fees on the debts that a county court has empowered them to collect.

It is extraordinary how less free citizens are in this respect than they were 400 years ago. Medieval laws against overbearing bailiffs were confirmed in a case in 1604 between one Peter Semayne and the heirs of his deceased business partner George Beriford, with whom he owned a house in Blackfriars. The court ruled that the only agent empowered to break the lock on a citizen's door was a sheriff acting on behalf of the King. Last year a petition was presented to Number 10 pointing out that the Government had succeeded in reversing an ancient law protecting us against bands of privateers. In its attempt to defend this loss of liberty, No 10 replied by arguing that the 1604 Act discriminated against the poor, who “couldn't afford locks”.

That's all right then. We now live in a country where bailiffs can batter down our doors before making off with our possessions, but at least there is no discrimination against the poor. Forget to pay a parking fine or overlook a credit card bill and we are all equally at risk of waking up to hear our front doors being splintered by a bull-necked debt-collector.

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