Proposed speech regulation in Great Britain:

The right to crack jokes or be rude about homosexuals could fall victim to new government laws to stamp out “homophobic” behaviour, Rowan Atkinson, the Blackadder star warned yesterday.

Atkinson, who mounted a successful campaign in 2004 to water down legislation aimed at criminalising expressions of religious hatred, has returned to the fray to defend the art of gay leg-pulling.

His concern is that Labour ministers are so obsessed with creating laws to stop people being rude about each other that they are putting in danger the right to free speech and, equally dear to his heart, the comedian’s craft.

In a letter to a newspaper he accused ministers of filling their legislative programme with measures that have “serious implications for freedom of speech, humour and creative expression”.

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Atkinson added: “The devil, as always, will be in the detail but the casual ease which some people move from finding something offensive to wishing to declare it criminal - and are then able to find factions within government to aid their ambitions - is truly depressing.”

The problem with regulating speech is, an awful lot of power is placed in the hands of the people charged with deciding what is and is not within bounds. Given how speech codes have been abused to punish political speech on college campuses, it’s even more chilling to think of government, with all of its various powers, trying to make these distinctions.

Do you trust that the right decision—as opposed to the politically expedient decision—would always be made in these cases?

If so, you have a hell of a lot more confidence in government than I do.