I grew up in Soviet Russia. I know only too well the value of free speech

Free speech is the foundational freedom — the freedom on which all our other liberties depend.

- BY EVGENY LEBEDEV

We recognise that Parliamentarians in both houses cannot do their job of checking abuses of power and upholding freedoms without having their right to free speech protected - and Parliamentary privilege has long existed to defend just that right.

But free speech - the ability to provoke, challenge, argue, dissent - should not be a privilege extended to a few. It is the essential right of all citizens. There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged. Beliefs we now regard as antique, ridiculous or pernicious were once orthodoxies which were overturned only because dissident voices challenged them. Restricting the vote solely to men; banning homosexuality; believing that prices and income should be fixed - all now seen as past follies, all once the present wisdom, they were only discarded because of brave dissidents.

For me - personally - the word dissident has a special resonance. I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime where expressing the wrong opinion meant imprisonment. The road where my family lived in Moscow - Granovsky Street - had once been home to the likes of Khrushchev, Molotov and Trotsky. During my childhood the presence of secret policemen - there ostensibly to "protect" us - was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form.

In that environment of oppression, I came to admire those who were the dissidents - those who spoke out so that others might live free - the Sakharovs, Brodskys and Solzhenitsyns. I have sought to honour their memory in my work as a media proprietor always seeking to champion voices that challenge and provoke. Sadly, my motherland today isn't much better.

The right to offend

Comparisons with the Soviet era may seem overwrought to some. In the England of my boyhood they would certainly have been misplaced. But consider this.