Freedom of certain kinds of speech?

Two pieces of bad news for lovers of free speech last week.  First, the turning away at Heathrow of the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders and then the hoo-ha over Richard Bean's play England People Very Nice at the National Theatre.  To be clear, I haven't seen either the play, or the film that Mr Wilders proposed to show at Westminster.  But if "free-speech" means anything beyond an inaccurate platitude, it means allowing people to express opinions you don't like.  

Justifying Wilders' ban on the grounds that letting him in might cause a riot, it must have embarrassed David Miliband to discover that Wilders had been over a month previously without any such thing happening.  You should be able to describe the Koran as "fascist", however wrong that might be, without attracting the attention of either the law or the Muslim great and good.  

As for Mr Bean, it disappointed me that so few of the usual suspects lined up against him seemed to realise that the fact that they didn't like his play was absolutely irrelevant in the context of freedom of speech.  I personally believe that racism is stupid as well as wrong, but that's only a matter of opinion, and the fact that it's the PC brigade which is edging towards a state where some opinions are officially OK and some not gives me concern.  Think how easily the jack-boot might be transferred to the other foot.

The fact is that immigration makes a lot of people in Britain extremely uneasy, and the more their voices are marginalised and brushed under the carpet the more likely it is that in the medium-term support for extremists will grow.