PEOPLE have a habit of listening to Russian prophets only when it suits them. For as long as Solzhenitsyn inveighed against the evils of communism, he was the Right's favourite novelist. When he left his homeland and started denouncing softness and decadence in the West, suddenly he was declared to have outlived his usefulness.

In a brilliant New Year letter to George W Bush, published in the Washington Post in December 2000, the "man we can do business with", Mikhail Gorbachev, asked the most pressing political question of our time. Why was there more disarmament before the end of the Cold War than there has been in the period after it? We had always been told that the Soviet Union needed to hold on to its 19,500 nuclear weapons and America needed to maintain its own 10,000 warheads because they represented a mutual threat that, it was argued, prevented war.

But now that war is no longer on the superpower agenda, what reason is there - besides crude military trade unionism: loss of jobs in the Pentagon - for the impending expansion of nuclear production to yet new levels of lunacy? Last Friday, in a magistrates' court in Fakenham, the peace activist Lindis Percy was found guilty under Section Five of the Public Order Act for disorderly behaviour and fined £200. Her crime, it seems, was to have gone, on December 16 last, to the US deep-and-near-space tracking station, misleadingly called RAF Feltwell - it contains no RAF personnel at all - and to have held up an American flag on which she had written the words "Stop Star Wars".

When Ms Percy had subsequently laid the flag on the ground and put her foot on it, the American gate guards (who will presumably eventually be offered trauma counselling against the permanent, psychological damage done to them by the sight of a 59-year-old grandmother stepping on the Stars and Stripes) claimed that they had been offended to a point where they were "brought close to tears".

It was hard, sitting on a wall with the accused in the sunshine outside the courtroom afterwards, to take this new offence of Making Grown Americans Weep entirely seriously. Ms Percy has, as they say, been in scrapes like this before. This Bradford midwife, who was born into a principled Quaker family and who is married to an industrial chaplain, has been to prison 12 times (Holloway, Low Newton, Bullwood Hall and Highpoint) without ever achieving the level of violence used by the Deputy Prime Minister against an elector last Wednesday.

By ignoring the defence that she had offered under Section 10 of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees the citizen's right to freedom of speech, expression and assembly, the district judge - who sat alone - set a sinister new precedent in English law. It will now be the court's right to dictate what form peaceful protest can and cannot take.

Anyone whose job is to cover this election campaign will recall the Prime Minister's stirring words about the dangers of apathy. It has always been Tony Blair's central belief that a sense of community can be restored only when citizens are readier to put other people's interests in front of their own.

At no point, however, has he suggested that they should then be rewarded for their efforts by what are effectively frivolous show trials. The Government's support for Star Wars II was invented on the hoof, not by the Prime Minister, but by the Prime Minister's spokesman. That support has never been debated in Parliament.

The US Supreme Court recently ruled that any American may burn the American flag as and when he so chooses. Sadly, it did not ask for jurisdiction over foreigners who want to step on it abroad. When de Gaulle was asked to condemn Sartre for some insult to the republic, he famously replied: "Sartre est aussis la France."

The Norfolk district judge, Patrick Heley, needs to be reminded that Lindis Percy is also Great Britain.

(See CAAB Report)