A short video posted from the Home Office Twitter account at the end of last month blamed EU regulations for ‘allowing activist lawyers to delay and disrupt returns’ of migrants. The government had been thwarted in its plans to put 23 migrants who had arrived in the UK on small boats on a charter flight to Spain. The video, described by The Times as resembling the opening sequence of the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army with arrows indicating ‘British forces attacking Nazi-occupied Europe’, was swiftly taken down.
The idea of activism being demeaned by government as a professional flaw predictably incensed the legal Twitterati: ‘ “Activist lawyers” again? Really? Doing your job is now activism, it seems,’ tweeted the Bar Council. ‘We are wondering what an “activist Home Secretary” does.’
Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, admitted that officials should not have used the phrase; however the home secretary waded in asserting people who had arrived in the UK in small boats had no ‘legal right’
