To anyone who follows parliamentary affairs, last week must have seemed a good one for the press. Potential threats to free speech melted away, not just once but twice. But I suspect that we are not much better off as a result.

The first victory was in defeating moves that would have deferred media reports of the family courts. Readers may remember that, after years of indecision from successive lord chancellors, Jack Straw rushed through reforms last April that allowed reporters to sit in on family proceedings in the county courts and the High Court. That did not mean we could report what we heard, even if nobody was identified. The statutory restrictions are understood to mean that reporters may report only the gist of the proceedings — the process rather than the substance.

Even so, I was able to spend two successive Monday mornings last month listening to urgent applications before the judge whose turn it was to be on 24-hour call that week. One counsel objected to my presence on principle. The judge decided that, unless there was a specific objection, I should be allowed to stay. But the client had no need to worry, the judge added: I was a very experienced and responsible reporter and knew what the law would permit me to report.

I didn’t know whether to be flattered or alarmed. With at least 10 overlapping statutes and plenty of judicial interpretation, I don’t think anybody can be sure what it’s safe to say. Fortunately, the Gazette’s lawyer has approved the report you have just read.

I believe I may also say that I was deeply impressed by both the judges I observed. They handled the proceedings with care, sensitivity and close attention to the practical details of everyday life. One judge even insisted that I should be allowed to see the parties’ written evidence, recognising that without it I would not have been able to make much sense of the proceedings.

Most of the time, though, there is little point in reporters attending court if they cannot report. That seems to have come as a surprise to the government, though some of us tried to point it out.

Bridget Prentice, the justice minister, wrote last November to more than 100 members of the judiciary, legal advisers, lawyers and children’s organisations involved with the family courts, asking how the new media arrangements were operating.

Only 13 responses were received. That, at least, is what it says on page 1 of the report she published in January. By page 14, the number of replies had shrunk to 12. And all of those were from people who said either that they were unaware of journalists attending family proceedings, or that instances of media attendance were rare.

So the government is trying to change the law to permit what it calls ‘authorised news publications’. The lord chancellor has managed to piggy-back the necessary reforms on Ed Balls’s entirely separate Children, Schools and Families Bill. But Straw’s clauses were not debated at all during the Bill’s committee stage in the House of Commons; next week, the Bill moves to the Lords.

‘The Bill is very complex,’ according to Sir Mark Potter, outgoing president of the High Court family division. If it is passed, ‘precious judicial time’ will be spent deciding whether the press can report high-profile cases.

Potter also advised MPs that most reporters would turn up on the first day of a hearing and report strongly-worded allegations made on behalf of an applicant, paying no attention to the other side’s subsequent response, or even to a judgment dismissing those allegations as unsubstantiated. That would hardly leave the public better informed.

His favoured solution was to ban reporting until an anonymised judgment was available. By then, reporters would know which allegations, if any, had been substantiated.

Potter’s idea of deferring reports until the case had been decided was taken up by the Conservatives last week and pressed to a Commons vote. The opposition lost, of course. And I suppose I should welcome this victory for free speech. But I cannot help thinking that Potter was right to tell MPs that, under the government’s plans ‘there will be no obligation, and frequently no interest, of the media to report [a corrective judgment], whatever damage may have been done by the earlier report’.

Of course, any case can be reported in a partial and one-sided way. But it is particularly important to ensure accurate reporting in family cases, not least because the whole point of allowing the media in is to give people a more rounded picture.

The other potential threat to free speech last week was the recommendation from the Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee that a strengthened Press Complaints Commission should be able to fine newspapers for breaches of the industry’s code of practice. In the most serious cases, the commission would have the power to suspend publication of a newspaper for one issue.

How would this work? Quite rightly, the MPs were not proposing legislation; any attempt by government to give judges control of the press would not go down well with newspapers. Instead, the committee seemed to be suggesting that the newspaper industry should award itself these powers on a self-regulatory basis. But without a firm government commitment to end self-regulation, why should they? And would newspapers really agree to sacrifice a day’s profits on the say-so of their rivals?

I can’t see it happening. We shall keep our free press; the alternative is just too expensive.