We have some wonderfully cynical English sayings about lawyers and the law. ‘He who loves the law shall have his fill of it.’ ‘One hundred lawyers and one hundred priests make two hundred thieves.’

My favourite is from George Bernard Shaw, namely, that all professions, not least the legal profession, are a ‘conspiracy’ against ordinary people.

Anyone who has bought a house can see what he means. What strikes you most is the arcane language designed to exclude all those who are not in the club. And, of course, hiring the expertise of a member of that club never comes cheap.

For all that, I personally am a huge fan of having efficiently enforced laws to settle disputes between people – but only after civilized, respectful dialogue has failed to resolve the problem. Those disputes might be scraps over property or attempts to quell anti-social behaviour, even criminal investigations into deep harms done to an individual through violence. The unifying factor is the law. And without it, justice can only come from the lynch mob or, more usually, not happen at all.

So what are we to make of the state of the justice system in Austerity Britain?

Surprise, surprise, a little digging soon reveals that like the NHS, social care, education and every other public service that makes life in the UK civilised and decent, our legal system has faced a barrage of cuts and is under threat.

According to one of the country’s most senior judges, Lady Justice Hallett, the English justice system is hanging on to its reputation as the best in the world by its “fingernails” due to the government’s failure to provide adequate funding.

As usual the numbers tell their own story. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has suffered the deepest cuts of any Whitehall department since 2010 and, as a result, shut 258 local courts across England and Wales.

In 2016, the Public Accounts Committee reported there had been a 26 per cent cut in spending on the criminal justice system since 2010-11. Further cuts of £600m to MoJ funding were announced by the Treasury in November 2017 – amounting to a nine per cent reduction of its budget to £6bn by 2019-20.

Lady Justice Hallett has pointed out that there is a bias in funding towards specialist commercial courts which bring in lucrative, international business to London. Indeed, the Law Society has warned that defence solicitors in criminal cases are in danger of becoming “extinct” because the Ministry of Justice has progressively reduced payments to the profession.

In addition, legal aid for ordinary people, a route to justice taken for granted only a couple of decades ago, is virtually unobtainable for all too many cases.

This stuff matters. The collapse of a series of recent rape cases because of failures to disclose key evidence has highlighted pressures on the criminal justice system. Lawyers say they are not being paid for reading and assessing the massive amount of digitally generated material routinely involved in many cases.

One miscarriage of justice is one too many. Who can measure the harm done to not just an individual but their extended family when bodged, cut price injustice occurs? And what about victims, whose rights are so often trumpeted as being of paramount importance? The thing victims of crime or people experiencing civil wrongs desire is a fair resolution of their grievances within the terms of the law. Achieving that cannot and should not be done on the cheap.

We all know that any government has certain basic functions it must fulfil to be worthy of the name. One is to protect its citizens, usually through a well-resourced and highly professional police force. Sadly, police numbers have fallen by 20 per cent because of government cutbacks.

The next basic function is for an effective legal system that means all citizens have access to justice regardless of their income. Justice should never be allowed to become yet another perk of the very wealthy.

To achieve that we need politicians in power who are truly of the people and for the people when it comes to accessing justice.