It is becoming impossible to keep up with the number of groups and “communities” feeling offended nowadays. In the past week alone, Jews have been offended by Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, and Irish and Muslims by Richard Bean’s play England People Very Nice. The author Margaret Atwood has been offended by the Dubai literary festival’s decision not to invite the obscure author of a novel about a gay sheikh, called The Gulf Between Us, and has pulled out of the event in protest.

As our society fragments into more and more special-interest groups – I’m sorry, I mean, as our society blossoms into an ever more vibrant and diverse “rainbow nation” – these competing groups find more and more reasons to feel offended, and to demand that the law protect them from feeling offended again. This is missing a fundamental point about a democratic state: the right to freedom of speech far outweighs the right not to feel offended. As George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

I criticised Seven Jewish Children last week in my review for this newspaper as a ludicrous, dishonest and grossly antiIsraeli rant. In response I have been accused of hating anything that “smells of Palestinians”, of being “rabidly pro-Zionist”, “lazy and stupid” and of having something called “a pan-European complex”. The first two accusations are false, though I certainly have my moments of laziness and stupidity and am secretly rather proud of having a “pan-European complex”.

So far, so good. Critics need to be fairly cheery and thick-skinned souls. As AA Gill put it, if you want to be loved, work with puppies. In one sense, though, Seven Jewish Children, with its outrageous portrait of modern Israel, along with all the criticism and counter-criticism surrounding it, has been quite heartening. Despite all the offence given and taken, nobody has suggested it should be banned. Even Howard Jacobson, who thought the play blatantly antisemitic, a “hate-fuelled little chamber piece” and “wantonly inflammatory”, nevertheless remains strictly opposed to censorship.

Meanwhile Jacqui Smith, our dim housewife of a home secretary (is that allowed?), has been banning outspoken foreigners left, right and centre – although mostly right. First there was Geert Wilders, the unfathomably hypocritical Dutchman with the mad hairdo who insists on free speech and wants to ban the Koran.

And then last week, Smith banned Pastor Fred Phelps, the Kansas preacherman who was hoping to fly to England and picket The Laramie Project, a school play in Basingstoke. The play dramatises the true murder of, as Phelps puts it in his robust way, one of the “sodomite damned”.

In a rare outburst of theatre criticism, Phelps has dismissed the play as “a tawdry bit of banal fag melodrama”. He hates Sweden, runs a website called God Hates Fags and believes that predatory homosexuals lurk behind every tree and bush. I suspect the pastor has unresolved issues.

What exactly is Smith trying to achieve by banning the nutter? Does she really think her own electorate are so stupid and easily led as to require protection from him? Does she really think that the good citizens of Basingstoke, if they should be exposed to Phelps in full rant, are suddenly going to think, “Golly, actually, you know, I think he might be right. Now he mentions it, I think God probably does hate fags”?

There is no doubt that Phelps is full of hate, but that has never been a crime. And our tradition of freedom of speech exists precisely to allow such people to speak in public, so that we can make up our own minds.

Smith is wrong to ban Wilders and Phelps, just as Wilders in turn is wrong to want to ban the Koran. These busybodies have proven themselves enemies of free speech.

Besides, there are so many better, more imaginative, more efficient and even more amusing ways of disarming the loonies than simply banning them. If Smith had thought about it for one minute, even she might have realised that the spectacle of Phelps shrieking, “God hates fags!” outside a school play in Basingstoke would not have constituted a serious threat to anyone, but on the contrary might have added considerably to the gaiety of the nation.

Our political leaders should toughen up a bit, and encourage some of the electorate to toughen up as well. There’s nothing dumb about freedom of speech.

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