The royal parks should be for the free recreation of all Londoners, not nice little earners for a few moneymen.

Where is London’s Tahrir Square? Where would thousands of Britons assemble if, plague the thought, they thought an elected government had ratted on its election promises? Where would they protest if, as now in Egypt, they felt pledges on jobs and public services had been broken?

London’s promenade of protest used once to run from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square. Such demonstrations now need police permission for fear of “terrorism”. Grander rallies would once go from the Embankment to Hyde Park. In February 2003, when a million people gathered in London to protest against Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, parks minister Tessa Jowell tried to stop them entering Hyde Park, on spurious “health and safety” grounds. Soon the sheer weight of numbers swamped the place and filled it anyway.

Jowell’s successors have found a different device. They can simply sell the park to private contractors and declare it closed. Today they have encased the park’s entire eastern end in barricades, lorry parks, caravans and an encampment of sheds and platforms for two weeks of concerts and grassland spoliation. Any protest would today have to await a rendering of You Can’t Always Get What You Want, as if sponsored by Her Majesty’s Treasury.

Nor would such a rally have more luck in Trafalgar Square, once the safety valve of dissidence and scene of a hundred CND rallies, student protests, union marches and anti-poll tax riots. When in May the Tamils staged their march and rally in the West End, they found the square had been leased to morris dancers. Protesters had to be crammed into Waterloo Place next door and bellow their slogans at the Athenaeum Club.

Last month, London’s large Brazilian community sought to rally against the cost imposed on their country by the World Cup and the Olympics — in part as a result of London’s pandering to the organisers of these lavish extravaganzas. They were forced to wander down Victoria Street and pitch camp on the grass outside the House of Lords.

Trafalgar Square used once to stand open to argument and anger. It now regularly fills with a clutter of worthy exhibitions and structures. It is a venue not for political demonstration but for political correctness, a sequence of ethnic festivals, Chinese new years, Russian pancake fairs and Eid revelry. If Tony Benn or Arthur Scargill wanted to wax rhetorical from the steps of Nelson’s Column they would need to dress in diwali costumes and promote literacy awareness.

All capital cities are cockpits of political congregation. British democracy may be robust but it too has its arguments. It needs to take them, however ineffectively, onto its streets and into its squares. The Blair government so loathed street protest as to let the police ban it within a kilometre of Parliament (a law since repealed).

London lacks the grand spaces of most capitals. It has no Place de la Concorde, Red Square, Tiananmen, Wenceslas or Pennsylvania Avenue. Its political institutions are housed in a job lot of buildings amid a maze of informal streets. Parliament Square is tiny and has been kept a traffic roundabout to aid security. St James’s and Green Parks are thick with trees. Revolutionary London is less Les Misérables than dirty cafés and draughty halls.

As for poor Hyde Park, there is no one to defend it. Try to do so and you will be called a killjoy, a fogey and the enemy of growth-and-jobs. The Establishment has seized it and turned it over to bread and circuses. No sooner has the winter funfair gone than the fashion shows and antique markets arrive to take its place. We now have two weekends of Rolling Stones and others. Their appearance in Hyde Park makes Glastonbury’s Worthy Down look like a vicarage garden. It is no longer a park but O2 up west.

This has nothing to do with public resort. Performances in New York’s Central Park are free. From Summerstage to concerts by the New York Philharmonic and Met Opera, the concept of the park as a place of open resort for all New Yorkers is sacred. Events are not for the profit of promoters or ticket agents. Nor are those who live on its fringe persecuted by late-night rock music.

Hyde Park at present looks as secure as Guantánamo Bay. This is small wonder, as even the cheapest tickets for the Stones, once £95, are now on the black market at between £300 and £12,000. When so many people want to see a show, it makes no sense to hold it in a central park rather than at Wembley or O2, just so a few lucky, rich people can have an easy journey home.

More to the point, if concert promoters, fair organisers and product salesmen can now purchase the royal parks for money and close them to the public, who is to set the limit? The parks agency operates under a statutory requirement that the parks cannot be used for commercial gain. It is there in black and white and is as old as the parks themselves, given to the people of London by successive royal families for their free recreation and enjoyment.

Whenever I put this to the authorities they just shrug. The law does not apply to them. The agency’s objective should be to maximise public enjoyment of open space, not maximise revenue from commercial exploitation. Its competitor should be the English countryside, not Olympia, O2 and Glastonbury, let alone Bluewater and Westfield.

Were events in the park at least open and free to all citizens, as in New York, its occasional enclosure might be tolerable. Instead, Hyde Park is no more open to all than the Ritz Hotel.