This is not, strictly speaking, a post about entrepreneurship, but all of us who work on the internet should unite to defend it against “super-injunctions” being issued illegally by British courts.

These are in effect general gagging orders, preventing the publication of true stories that are considered embarrassing. Even the names of those who apply for such orders cannot be published.

This is precisely the sort of attack on free speech for which the likes of the government of Red China are generally and rightly condemned. They are immoral in a free country. More than that, they are very, very stupid.

For a start, they are counter-productive. Stories that would otherwise be forgotten by the time the next day’s newspapers came out have become the subject of ongoing speculation. The pretext that the orders protect an adulterer’s children is laughable, since those children’s contemporaries were probably the first to find out the real facts on-line.

Meanwhile, the speculation has, as speculation always does, led to other people being falsely accused of being the ones who took out the super-injunctions. The courts seem to have ignored the fact that these innocent victims might have children too.

Yet it is not only the consequences, but the whole concept, of the super-injunction that undermines the reputation of the British judiciary. It is illogical to the point of absurdity for the courts to order us not to say that X is an adulterer when the order does not tell us who X is! How can we obey an order we have not been given?

The super-injunctions farce is part of a deeper problem. The British constitution relies on an implicit understanding that the judiciary will remain politically independent in return for not interfering in the political process of law making. However, judges have recently – especially since the Americanised title of “Supreme Court” was introduced – been behaving more and more like politicised American judges, and are making up their own laws on the bench. That there is no legislation or tradition to support the notion of super-injunctions is just one more example of this.

Perhaps there is a business issue here after all. Legal services are a major British export. International contracts often used to contain a clause that disputes would be resolved in British courts, because they were considered apolitical, fair and consistent. That will change if British judges keep making it up as they go along.