I find it really striking that the joint attempt by police and the Crown Prosecution Service to slap an Anti Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) on English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon, which would effectively have prevented him from protesting with the group he founded, seems not to have aroused the concerns of liberals and civil liberties campaigners. Even those usually quick to man the barricades when similar attacks on people's freedoms take place.
And yet here is a very blatant example of the way in which the ASBO is being used to remove the democratic freedoms of individuals and deprive them of freedom of speech and expression.
Before anyone jumps to conclusions, as a left-wing libertarian who believes in open borders and has no time for scaremongering about the rise and influence of extreme Islam in the West, I'm about as far from the EDL on the political spectrum as you can get. Nor in any way do I condone Lennon's head-butting of a fellow EDL member at a rally in Blackburn earlier in the year, the reason for his court appearance.
But that doesn't mean Lennon isn't right when he claims: "This was an attempt to silence me and take away my democratic rights." Equally I'd argue he would've been right to oppose it, as he claimed he would: "If the ASBO had been imposed, it would have meant me going to jail. I would have broken it and broken it."
In this instance, when the verdict was announced last Friday, the judge threw the proposal out and accepted Lennon's legal defence that such a punishment was 'disproportionate', a result of the police being 'desperate to stop him being involved with the EDL at all costs'.
In the past EDL supporters haven't been so fortunate to have an unelected judge who decided to permit them to be able to still protest freely. Tagged on to the punishments they were given for their actions - which were undeniably appalling - were draconian infringements on their democratic freedoms. For example, earlier in the year, 19-year-old Joel Titus was forbidden from attending any demonstration connected with the EDL for three years. He was also banned from carrying banners or using language "which could cause alarm or distress" and can't enter mosques and a defined area of Whitechapel in London.
He's not alone. In March, 38-year-old Shane Overton had a criminal ASBO slapped on him for "offensive language" and was banned from attending or helping to organise any EDL demonstration, meeting or gathering or from even visiting its website for 10 years (how that's enforceable baffles me). And, last year, two other EDL supporters were given ASBOs preventing them from taking part in EDL activities online and off and from attending any protests regardless of content, anywhere in the UK that isn't within a 10-mile radius of Birmingham.
The reaction to all this? Hardly a peep. Tellingly, when earlier in the year home secretary Theresa May banned the EDL from marching in Tower Hamlets in September, a stink was only raised when all other protesters were banned from marching too. It was only when counter-protesters were banned from marching, they claimed it was a breach of "human rights". Evidently the EDL - a ban on whom many of the supporters actively campaigned for - aren't deemed to be human enough to possess such rights.
Fundamentally, either you have free speech in society or you don't. When the state - or its agents, the police and unelected judges - are able to place restrictions on what certain individuals can or cannot say and who they assemble with, then none of us are ultimately free to say whatever we like.
Surely even my colleagues on the left who would count the EDL among their greatest enemies can see that allowing the state to decide whether people are allowed to protest or not is a bad idea? Surely they're not so blinded by self-righteousness and hatred, they fail to realise it could be them getting ASBOs slapped on them next? Do they lack such faith in their ability to win the argument and counter the EDL in other ways that they now believe compromising democratic freedoms and embracing the state is the best option?
To update pastor Martin Niemöller's famous statement: First they came for the EDL...