The Home Office social media team has recently come under fire for using Twitter to further a political agenda. Government accounts such as @ukhomeoffice should be used to provide information to the public, not to polemicise and so the tweet was eventually deleted.

The tweet in question was about small boat crossings to the UK and included a short video that bemoaned the role played by “activist lawyers to delay and disrupt returns”.

That language prompted a full statement by the Law Society who termed the description as “misleading and dangerous”.

In reality such ‘activism’ actually means representing their client and ensuring that justice is done in line with the laws of the UK. The only reason that it appears as activism at all is because often these lawyers are not getting paid a great deal but that itself is because of government cuts to legal aid.

It is a dangerous precedent for the government to decry any legal professional who dares challenge its actions. A significant proportion of civil litigation is made up of the government winning and losing cases; that flow is an important part of the democratic process in action. Even when politicians see fit to criticise lawyers who are representing the interests of their clients it serves to undermine the rule of law.

At least part of the reason that officials feel comfortable attacking lawyers in this way is because of a narrative that has been cultivated over the years by the media. In the past week alone we have seen a front page from the Daily Mail that lambasts the legal aid made available for the killers of PC Andrew Harper and a story in The Sun despairs at the fact that 23 migrants were “sprung” by their lawyers.

It is hard to imagine any other walk of life where someone would get so heavily criticised for doing their job successfully. A surgeon dragged over the coals for performing a heart transplant? A builder subjected to scorn for erecting a wall? That is inconceivable and yet when a lawyer demonstrates mastery of the legal system it is they who are criticised and not the system itself.

When it comes down to it, all lawyers are activists. Not in the sense that they are pushing a political agenda but rather that entering the profession requires a deep, internal belief in the value of the rule of law. In recent years that has unfortunately become something that is controversial but therein lies a further reason why we all have to fight harder than ever.