I’VE ALWAYS been under the impression that United States was the world’s freest society, with an unparalleled record for defending freedom around the world, with a finely developed legal system, constitutional protections that put most other democracies to shame and a law enforcement policy that has seen crime rates plunge.

What an idiot! To read the reaction to the extradition of the NatWest Three, it seems that the US is a hell-hole, with a justice system akin to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with a penchant for seizing random people from around the world and imprisoning them on a whim. Even more shamefully, they don’t just take terror suspects but nice middle-class professional Brits with families.

I have no idea if the Nat West Three are fraudsters or entirely innocent. None of us does. Certainly not Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Attorney General, who has written to his counterpart to demand that he halt the three men’s extradition.

The US authorities, however, think that they are guilty of a massive fraud that is directly linked to the collapse of Enron — and so they want to try them. Not to sentence them peremptorily, not to hang them, not to lock them up without trial for 30 years, but . . . to put them on trial.

And, er, that’s it. That’s the huge injustice that they are facing. A trial, where the evidence will be weighed, and a jury will decide. When a trial takes place here we call it justice. When it takes place in the US we call it an outrage.

The British authorities don’t want to try them, the cry has gone out, so they should be left alone. Well, maybe, just maybe, that’s because the US is far tougher on white-collar crime than we are.

But they’ll await trial alongside murderers and rapists! Indeed. That’s what happens when you’re locked up. It’s not meant to be pleasant.

Most stupidly of all, we are told that we shouldn’t extradite them to the US because they didn’t extradite IRA suspects to us. Genius. Explain, please, how the best response is allowing other indicted defendants to escape trial, too?

None of the fuss has anything to do with justice. It’s merely the latest manifestation of the British establishment’s default mode: sneering superiority towards those awful hick Americans. And it’s as nauseating as usual.