So anyway, there I was commenting away, happily back on the Guardian’s comment threads under a new (if thinly disguised) identity. And I thought, that’s funny….not a single hit on the site as a result.

And then I saw the familiar appearance of bright red letters above my comment form announcing ‘this comment will be held for moderation’. I assume they censor sorry moderate all comments anyway, but the words popped up to remind me: ‘We’re on your case, Naziboy’.

So I checked the nine comments made over the last three working days. All gone. Every last one – as if they’d never existed.

It started earlier this year, when a hopelessly misinformed article in the Grauniad about the Stafford Hospital case appeared toeing the Party line about mad people attacking an ‘innocent’ social and medical administration. My comment thread was clinically critical of the piece, but not insulting and used no obscenities. It was taken down after twenty minutes.

Before that spat, there had been the denunciation of a piece I wrote in Comment is Free, and subsequent denial of all access to that soon followed. Then two weeks ago my comment ‘privileges’ were removed entirely. Numerous subsequent emails tried to establish why, all of which offered really rather pathetic obfuscations and uninformation. It was Kafka’s The Trial come to life.

I’ve rattled quite a few cages about this over the last ten days. Nobody seems to be particularly interested. The apathy stems partly from widespread acceptance that ‘this is what the Guardian does’ these days (horribly depressing) and a sort of born-after-1970 thing one comes across more and more now ‘yeh well, don’t go on about it, right? Snot that big a problem’ (intensely irritating).

I emailed the profoundly unlovely Peter Hain about it, but he wasn’t interested either. I’m sure being a privileged Rhodesian white boy, he doesn’t get it: his assumption has always been that the Left is always right, and the Right is always wrong. Were I a goose-stepping loony with 0.007% electoral support, he’d have written a piece in The Independent about it by now; but as I’m a political radical who wants to see a fine old mass circulation newspaper relearn the principles of free speech, I’m clearly a danger to society and should be reported to Special Branch.

I’m as big an egotist as the next man, but this saga isn’t about me – any more than the Staffordshire scandals were about brave people like Barbara Richards and the Single Mother Who Cannot be Named for Legal Reasons. It’s about a perverted form of self-styled progressive fascism that’s just a gnat’s away from burning books.