virtually banned and religious hatred laws have stifled authentic debate between faiths and instituted 'thought crime' as a new criminal offence. Indeed, just last week the police arrested Christian missionaries for walking into a Muslim area.

We have strayed so far from our proper constitutional traditions that it is worth pausing to reflect on what we have lost. Magna Carta, that great foundation of modern English liberty, was signed under protest by King John in Runnymede 793 years ago this Sunday - on June 15, 1215. Its fundamental legacy was to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power and prevent unjust imprisonment without charge. Habeas corpus is the beginning of the great English tradition of limiting absolute power and progressively ensuring the liberty and protection of all under the law.

As a result, Britain was the society that Voltaire eulogised in the 18th century as a shining example of liberty, an exemplar that the rest of the world should follow. And Britain in the centuries that followed built such an aversion to absolute

power and despotic rule that it produced the only European culture capable of defeating fascism and repudiating communism. Furthermore, this is the nation that created in books like 1984 and Brave New World a prescient and righteous disgust for the modern trend to totalitarianism.

So in this post-democratic age, when the Labour Party's craven acolytes emerge to denounce Davis's decision as opportunistic, one can only wonder at how the party of Keir Hardie, Attlee and Bevan has fallen so low. No doubt because they lack any principles, government supporters and media commentators cannot conceive the possibility that such a morality might exist in others.

I watched the whole debate on the BBC: the erudite and passionate defence of freedom and liberty articulated by Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Diane Abbott was truly moving. Davis has sacrificed his political career for the sake of Magna Carta, a tradition we sorely need to recover in the face of elected despotism and a dangerous and invasive state.