I’m not into tittle tattle and gossip. Some, such as my fellow total politics blogger, Harry Cole, make a living out of it – good luck to him but it’s not the sort of stuff I’m bothered about.

John Hemming MP (to declare an interest and unfair advantage in this matter, my employer) has been making a lot of noise recently on super and hyper injunctions – about time to.

He’s touched on an important issue. Rich people, almost all men, have been taking these out to cover various alleged and rumoured about misdemeanour's in their private life, almost all of which, that we know about, have some sort of sexual angle.

Francesca Preece is right to say that celeb sex is not in the public interest and this week at least, I agree with her. Where there is a strong privacy case, that should be taken into account.

No the interest is not and should not be sex – it's infantile caring about who’s shagging who. The much bigger issue and the one the red tops haven’t quite grasped yet is what else these injunctions can be used for.

Super and hyper injunctions are nefarious – once granted they not only protect the identity of the individuals involved, but they may stop discussion or publication of the circumstances of the issue, or stop people contacting people in positions of authority.

Whilst that has the effect of stopping us knowing which celebrity or footballer is having an affair and the tabloids publishing any gossip about it – it can also quite easily be used to gag the press about legitimate issues of public concern, say a company dumping toxic waste, or where it is speculated that illness resulted from re-coated water tanks.

Those are not hypothetical scenarios. The former refers to the busted super injunction Trafigura took out to gag the Guardian reporting that it had dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

The second, a hyper injunction, refers to a case Mr Hemming raised in the Commons in March. The whole transcript is worth a read.

An, as yet unnamed, company, took out a hyper injunction against an individual preventing them talking to; in order; the US coastguard, any other coastguard, MPs, journalists, lawyers, any operator of ships or any other third party the fact that a number of ships had had water tanks re-coated and that there was speculation that this had led to illness with a man named as ‘H’ collapsing.

The ‘defendant’ in this case sought legal advice, and was given a two week suspended sentence for breaking the injunction. We now live in a society where Judges are banning people talking to their elected representatives, seeking legal advice and thus criminalising those seeking justice.

This is the nefarious nature of our super injunction culture.

It can cost up to £25,000 to contest a super injunction, spare change for a rich celebrity or a large corporation but an amount that would bankrupt an ordinary person who found out something of supreme public interest but was then slapped with an injunction. Legal Aid is not available.

It’s got to the point where individuals aren’t even bothering to follow through on proceedings, The case of ‘AMM’ was also brought up in Mr Hemming’s point of order on Tuesday, a celebrity who took out an interim injunction ‘pending court proceedings’, but then never brought them.

We have sleepwalked into a situation where the rich and the powerful can steamroller the public interest with an injunction. We don’t know about them, we don’t know whether they cover up gossip or real matters of public concern, we don’t even know how many there are out there – not even the Ministry of Justice, or Her Majesties Court Service knows that.

When injunctions are brought against the whole world, and people are banned from even talking to MPs we live in a society where the rich and businesses have found a way to cover up their wrongdoing and undermine the very sovereignty of parliament.

We know of a clutch of affairs because they’ve been contested or rumoured: gossip, the stuff which the Sun, the Star and Guido Fawkes thrive on – what is insidious are the cases we don’t know about and should.

I’m not bothered about gossip – I understand there’s some sort of wedding on today - but I am bothered about cover-ups and the creation of de facto law without parliamentary oversight, or public legitimacy. We need to overhaul this nefarious state of affairs as soon as humanly possible.

Tags: John Hemming, Super-injunctions