If courtrooms are part-theatre, then the supreme court has become the stage for a new, dystopian kind of play. Five justices, white- and grey-haired, a few papers and a single microphone their only prop, sat neatly behind a curved bench in an oak-panelled room.

One of the five, Lord Reed, proceeded to create a character: a single mother who works full-time and has one child. She is an administrator in a university, taking home just over £2,000 a month, from which she budgets a modest £10 for her child’s clothes; £48 a week for social events, things like birthday presents and group activities; and £5 a week for alcohol, which is probably just enough for a single glass of wine with a friend.

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We are used to the government telling us how people on benefits should behave, but this courtroom scene revealed a government diktat on how someone with a private salary should behave. If this woman wrongly loses her job, unfairly dismissed, or as a result of discrimination, the government says she can afford the £720 bill now imposed on employment tribunal claims. It’s “affordable”, ministers say, by sacrificing all nonessential spending on herself and her child for a period of three and a half months.

If the government is seriously trying to rebrand itself as a friend to low- and middle-income working people, I can only assume they think no one reads their legal arguments. Since the then lord chancellor Chris Grayling introduced the policy of blanket fees for employment tribunals in 2013, the government has spent four years and two highly expensive litigations defending this stance.

That, the supreme court has now said, was a serious mistake. The employment tribunal fees have not deterred people with vexatious or trivial claims, as the government and some businesses said they would, but served as a barrier to justice for people with every right to seek it. There has been no increase in the success rate of claims that did make it to court, suggesting the fees were not filtering out the weak cases.

The fees have not deterred people with vexatious or trivial claims, but served as a barrier to justice

The claims that were filtered out, on the other hand, were likely to be those of people like the hypothetical single mother. You cannot, the court pointed out, subject access to justice to “impositions which low- to middle-income households can only meet by sacrificing ordinary and reasonable expenditure for substantial periods of time”. Cautious people who have lost their jobs are unlikely to make that choice – which explains why, since the blanket fees were imposed, employment tribunal claims have fallen by up to 70%.

This has huge significance for people who have felt the balance of power tilt away from workers and towards their companies under Conservative and coalition ministers. But its implications are far wider.

In an era which has seen the judiciary labelled “enemies of the people” – in an outrageous attack by some newspapers which the government was content to quietly observe – the judiciary has responded with a neatly plotted lesson for ministers on the basics of the UK’s constitution. The government – wrongly, the court said – claimed that transferring the cost of employment tribunals away from the taxpayer and on to claimants would save money and deter unmerited cases. But it failed to understand the wider, unquantifiable benefit of a democracy characterised by access to justice – without which, Lord Reed pointed out, “the democratic election of members of parliament may become a meaningless charade”.

And, in perhaps a veiled reference to Brexit, the court could not resist trumpeting the fact that, while protected in EU law, access to justice has its roots in a much-cherished English tradition. Lord Reed cited Magna Carta, and the closing words attributed to Edward I in 1297: “We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.”

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Employment tribunals are not the only area of justice whose access in recent years has been restricted by prohibitive costs. The government has already been forced to reverse its attempted 500% rise in immigration tribunal fees, but had until now insisted it would do something to increase them. Ministers may now want to review that to avoid another withering court decision against them.

The supreme court’s judgment was strong and principled, but it doesn’t solve all the problems. Claimants who overcome the hurdles to get their employment cases to court and then go on to win are still relatively unlikely to actually receive the money they’re awarded. A government study before fees were introduced found that only half of successful claimants were paid in full – enforcement remains a major challenge in employment law.

But the tribunal fee ruling is a cautious victory. The supreme court found the system so offensive to our constitutional principles that all those who paid the fees after they were imposed in 2013 will be entitled to a refund. No one knows exactly how much that will cost. And seeing a government that has in the past claimed a monopoly on patriotism receive a stern lecture on the basics of English law and the UK constitution? That is absolutely priceless.