"Americans who fail to appreciate the protection provided by the First Amendment should consider the case of the nation that gave freedom of expression to the world.
Britain is facing a crisis of press freedom. To quote from the first editorial of the recently founded British Journalism Review, newspapers are getting less, not more, free, and a vast array of restrictive laws and practices is "choking the lifeblood out of British journalism." What has happened to the land of Magna Carta and Areopagitica? Is liberty of the press no longer, in Blackstone's words, "the birthright of Britons?" Were the authors of the American Bill of Rights wrong to suppose that the First Amendment laid down no "novel principles" but simply embodied "certain guarantees and immunities we had inherited from our English ancestors?" Has modern Britain betrayed her libertarian heritage?
The answer to these questions is that Britain's heritage has been widely misunderstood, especially abroad. It is not what it seems at all.
For the fundamental fact is that no written constitution exists to safeguard British liberties. The government is an elective dictatorship which can and does abridge them as it chooses. As the second Earl of Pembroke said, "parliament can do any thing but make a man a woman, and a woman a man." After the English Bill of Rights was enacted in 1689, politicians frequently paid lip service to free expression. But the attitude of successive administrations was epitomized by Charles II's press censor, Sir Roger L'Estrange, who opposed newspaperdom because "it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors."
http://www.cjr.org/year/91/6/envy.asp
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