"These shock jocks were national institutions, with millions of weekly listeners. They were a new and important part of the American constitution, and that is my first objection to the utterly demented decision by Jacqui Smith's Home Office to announce that Michael Savage, America's third most popular radio show host, is banned from entering this country. It just makes us look so infantile, so pathetic.
Every day the American airwaves are churned by the paranoid rantings of Michael Savage and his kind. Has this stuff warped America, or deformed its political psyche? On the contrary, the Americans have just had the good sense to elect a supremely gifted and eloquent black man – when the prospect of a black British prime minister still seems some way off. What are we, some sort of kindergarten that needs to be protected against these dangerous American radio shows? Does Jacqui Smith think we are all dimwits, who can't tell when a man like Savage is talking rubbish? Why can America take it, and we can't?
The answer is that America still has a constitutional protection of free speech, and I have been amazed, over the last few days, to see how few people in this country are willing to stick up for that elementary principle. Across Fleet Street, swords have stuck in their scabbards, swords that normally leap to the defence of liberty.
I am not aware that a single MP has spoken on this subject, apart from David Winnick, who went on Newsnight to agree with Jacqui Smith. Harold Wilson once called Mr Winnick "the stupidest man in the House of Commons", a reputation he did nothing to shake with his performance. Mr Winnick said that Savage should be banned from this country for claiming that many children with autism were "brats". That is indeed an odious and ill-informed opinion. But surely it should be blindingly obvious even to David Winnick that it is possible to despise the things that Michael Savage says, and yet to think that it is very odd indeed to bar him from this country.
Such is the terror of being associated with Mr Savage's ugly ravings, that no one dares speak up for common sense and proportionality. To exclude someone from entering this country is a serious act of state. We have not been told how the decision was taken. We do not know which criteria were applied.
All we can say for certain is that there was no attempt to consult our elected representatives in the House of Commons, engrossed as they now are in defending their expenses, and it looks very much as though the list of banned persons was rushed out to cover up the hoo-ha over the Home Secretary's taxpayer-funded bath plug.
Michael Savage has said ignorant and unpleasant things about gay people, autism and Muslims. But it is far from clear that he would be in breach of any law, even in this country. The world is full of loudmouth media berks with views that we would all like to keep to themselves, but we can't ban them all from entering Britain.
Perhaps Jacqui Smith thinks that it "sends out a signal" about the kind of Britain we want. On the contrary, it reinforces a culture – created by this Labour Government, and its addiction to political correctness – where people are increasingly confused and panic-stricken about what they can say and what is forbidden, a culture where a police officer can seriously think he is right to arrest a protester for calling a police horse "gay". Our courts and tribunals are clogged with people claiming to have suffered insults of one kind or another, and a country once famous for free speech is now hysterically and expensively sensitive to anything that could be taken as a slight. "
For myself I find much of what Michael Savage says tasteless and exaggerated but far less offensive than that which the Undercover Mosque programme exposed, and the Imams shown live and work in the UK.
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