The speakers are no longer potential history-makers (seemingly today's great revolutionaries and paladins prefer to kickstart their journey to greatness by blogging). The hecklers are as rude as ever and still the occasional tomato is thrown. On a good day, the place is a healthy cacaphony of speakers' ranting and abuse by the crowd, accompanied by the inevitable chants from hot dog stands and other tourist traps. An excellent way of spending an hour in the autumn sunshine - walking away feeling reassured that one's fears for personal insanity pale away into insignificance against the barmy backcloth of Speakers' Corner.

In Speakers' Corner, the speaker is allowed to talk about any subject without fear of legal repercussions. Just two subjects - the British Royal Family and the overthrow of the British government - are non-permissible. More often than not there's present a jovial fellow standing on a box with a matted beard, invariably over-replete with cider, wearing a sandwich-board sign with "Pickles cause cancer" written on each side, divulging repeatedly to those gathered his anti-pickle mantra. If you're lucky, real, live communists appear there, preaching from on top of their soap-boxes, watched by salivating students of modern history as ornothologists once watched the dodo in the days of its last chirps.

George Orwell, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx all used to speak at Speakers' Corner. Nowadays - however insane you feel yourself - you're on the constant lookout for the men in white coats and ambulances to seize the speakers (and hecklers); half-expecting a doctor, with a strait jacket in one hand and a syringe in the other, to jump out from behind a nearby oak tree or ice-cream van. This has not stopped Speakers' Corner becoming an export - there are now Speakers' Corners in Holland, Singapore, Trinidad and Canada, as well as that informal Speakers' Corner generally referred to as L.A.

Today's political leaders speak less and less to the real crowd (audience members frequently picked by spin doctors and speeches made increasingly to cameras and radio microphones). Winning politically today is perhaps less than ever about having the backbone to overcome the hecklers - more about scoring points based on vote target analysis. Nonetheless, "going before the people" still has something of the Speakers' Corner about it - crowds have simply swapped (many begrudgingly) their tomatoes for ballot papers.

The true beauty of Speakers' Corner is not the speakers or the hecklers (who are brave even though they are mostly crazy). It is the mutual glances between the sane members of the crowd - their communally-raised eyebrows, looks of disgust, puzzlement and chuckles. For this is the essence of the mainstream - personified. These are the voters which serious, realistic politicians need to win over whether they like them or not. These people - mostly innocent bystanders or tourists incessantly fiddling with camcorders - are the men and women who shape the world in reaction to a speaker's promises. They are the centre ground.

Today, there are political entities who refuse to face the real crowd at all - the crowd they face is constituted of blind followers (with whom they are all too ready to hold public rallies and ride themes often obtusely associated with their true political aims). These political entities refuse to embrace democracy because they know they would be refused by the crowd - trounced at elections and heckled into grim reality by the masses.

Such political entities who refuse to face the electorate could do worse than spending time speaking at Speakers' Corner. But to get a grip on reality they should not focus on their hecklers. Instead, they should gauge the silent glances and communally-raised eyebrows of the masse that is today's centre ground.

How can the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam continue to hoard cash and weapons - accumulated through their criminal networks and deceitful charity fronts - while ignoring the plight of the thousands of Tamil refugees they have left to rot in filthy refugee camps? The Tamil Tiger crowd that meets annually in July in London (in spite of a UK ban on the LTTE) - in the same park as Speakers' Corner - is a blind (or dragooned) crowd living in a parallel universe, as it venerates twenty-foot cardboard cut-outs of its terrorist leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. They should focus less on the faces of sycophants and more on the faces of the silent majority - those garage-workers and shopkeepers in Britain they daily rob blind, the poor Tamil refugees in camps in Sri Lanka and India, and those Tamils around the world who they rely on for mafia-style payments to feather their own luxurious existences, and hopefully disrupt the peace process with. They do not need to be terrorists. They should have the guts to face the crowd but they fear its real message - "stop the cowardly corruption and the pathetic lies and genuinely represent us while being held accountable for funds raised". Instead of getting banned in Britain and elsewhere, the Tamil Tigers should have won over the people - they could not snap out of their parallel universe in time.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is an explicitly political organization: its declared aim, on its website, is "to carry the Islamic call in a political way". It is not interested in tolerance or compromise with other faiths. It openly despises democracy as an unbelievers' system, and advocates a worldwide state based solely on the strict interpretation of sharia law - a caliphate in all Muslim lands (all land is Allah's, so all land is Muslim according to them). They would be destroyed if they embraced democracy, and they know it. They have a big mouth for a group with so few members (just numbering hundreds in the UK).

They are very secretive about how many members they actually have because they are scared to death of a public vote in the real world - as scared as those little men taking a communal shower after a football match. In Britain they would poll perhaps a thousandth of the votes of the Monster Raving Loony Party (occasional Speakers' Corner attendees - a party which has no MP's and generally loses deposits on seats it contests at general elections). Speakers' Corner would be Hizb ut Tahrir's nightmare if they dared to look closely enough at the core crowd, which (shock, horror) includes women. The Monster Raving Loony Party's leader begins a recent consultation to members, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, small furry animals, and inanimate objects: lend me your ears. I'll return them next Tuesday", while Hizb ut Tahrir Britain's website proudly declares, "the party disseminates its thoughts through discussion with the masses". No prize for guessing who is going to get more splattered by British tomatoes here, let alone suffer more silent looks of disgust - not the Monster Raving Loonies but the unreal and lying Loony, Raving Monsters.

There are many other examples of UK-based groups who do not have the guts to face the tomatoes. Combat 18 is a British neo-Nazi organization formed in 1992 after meetings between the group Blood & Honour and football hooligans such as the Chelsea Headhunters - they do not stand at elections. The "18" in their name is commonly used by Neo-Nazi groups, and is derived from the initials of Adolf Hitler: (A and H the first and eighth letters of the English alphabet). What about the other white supremacist parties, Islamist parties like Followers of Ahl Sunna Wahl Jamaah, the closed (yet political) religious sects, the Black Panthers and others? A dose of the Speakers' would do them an awful lot of good - help them identify their deep-rooted psychological flaws and unpopularity, while helping their brainwashed or desperate members snap back into free, mainstream reality.

Parties like the British National Party, Natural Law Party, Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), Sinn Fein and George Galloway's Respect Party at least stick their heads above the parapet in British elections and suffer consequent reality checks as part of the democratic process - even if many score less than the Teddy Bear's Alliance and the Fancy Dress Party. Though many would wish such parties did not exist, at least they face the crowds.

The common thread that runs through the political groups who refuse to face the crowd is that - should they ever gain power - they'd expect the masses to be silent. Why should they suddenly start listening to the crowd they've previously ignored?

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. The more reality checks which we can deal out now to these groups of a parallel universe, the better for us all in the long run. It is time to revive this lesson of the Speakers' Corner.

One hundred and fifty years ago no political group would get anywhere without public speeches before the masses. With today's proliferation of media - especially the Internet - a political party invented yesterday can be made to look far larger and far more enticing than the reality would suggest. This is an increasingly unhealthy state of affairs, especially now that so many groups use racial and religious badges to further their political aims - they have no centre ground to be measured against and their dogma can spread like wildfire online or through high-profile public atrocity, whatever lies it tells, without being held to account.

Dominic Whiteman is spokesperson for the London-based VIGIL anti-terrorist organization - an international network of terror trackers, including former intelligence officers, military personnel and experts ranging from linguistic to banking experts.

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