Rather bizarrely, given a busy news agenda, last week I was inundated with letters and emails demanding that the proposal for an ‘equality oath’ should be abandoned.
I am confident that most people will never have heard of it, and I confess that it rather took me by surprise.

The genesis of this proposal is the review on community cohesion published by Dame Louise Casey last year. This reported that ethnic segregation is increasing and that we need to do more to ensure that immigrants integrate fully into British society.

The review identified a need to establish a set of values around which people from all different backgrounds can unite. To this end, it suggested the introduction of an integration oath on arrival for immigrants intending to settle in Britain, but the review also identified a need to increase standards of leadership and integrity in public office, suggesting that this could be done by developing a new oath for holders of public office.

The lobby against the proposal is promoted by evangelical Christians concerned that the oath may be used as a means of excluding from public office anyone who has religious reservations about the validity of same sex marriage.

I think this is somewhat implausible given our fundamental commitment to freedom of religion. To be fair to their suspicions however, oaths have certainly been used to exclude religious dissenters in the past.

The Test Act of 1673 required an oath not just from office holders, but also from entrants to professions and universities. It was in response to Charles II’s willingness to move on from the lingering divisions of the civil war and the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In 1672 he used his prerogative powers in the Declaration of Indulgence to remove disadvantages and restrictions placed on non-conformists and Catholics. Parliament’s response a year later proved that there was still no mood for forgiveness and that bygones were to remain top priority. The Act required that applicants give ‘assent and consent to all and everything contained in, and proscribed by the Book of Common Prayer’. Clearly, the only shared value around which Parliament believed the country should unite, was to be full membership of the Church of England.

This had profound social consequences. The exclusion of non-conformists from public office, professions and universities led them to concentrate on commerce and industry, with their own schools to nurture them. It is for this reason that so many of our historic successful companies were founded in the non-conformist tradition, for example Barclays, Wilkinsons, Courtaulds, and Cadburys.

The Government will respond to Dame Louise’s recommendations in the spring. Notwithstanding the importance of equal treatment under the law as a constitutional principle, I would prefer the oath to have a rather wider compass. My preference would be a simple oath of allegiance to the reigning monarch who, after all, sums up all our national values. MPs and members of the armed forces swear such an oath, so I can’t see why every other holder of public office shouldn’t do so too, and I doubt that evangelicals will object to that.

I cannot remember a time when there wasn’t political row of some sort over the NHS, or a time when there wasn’t talk of a ‘winter crisis’.

We have to set the hyperbole of media reports and the ridiculous comparisons of some commentators, such as the director of the Red Cross and his talk of an humanitarian crisis, against the realities experienced by the people that we know. Patient satisfaction with the NHS is at a record high, with patients saying they have never been treated more safely and with more dignity and more respect. The number of complaints that I receive has diminished dramatically, and the number writing to commend the care that they have received has increased correspondingly. In the last couple of weeks two people close to me have received first class care: one walked into casualty with a broken foot, and the other was taken by ambulance in an emergency with a stroke.

There are now 11,000 more nurses and 11,000 more doctors working in the NHS. On cancer, we are starting treatment for 130 more people every single day, and have achieved record cancer survival rates; we have 1,400 more people getting mental health treatment every day and some of the highest dementia diagnosis rates in the world; we are doing 5,000 more operations every day and that, despite those 5,000 more operations every day, MRSA rates have halved.

We are spending more on the NHS than ever before, with plans to increase that expenditure year on year.
There are, of course, very significant problems for which we are going to have to find solutions.
People who would ordinarily have died from a heart attack in their fifties or sixties, were saved by modern medicine over recent decades, and are now presenting in their eighties with multiple and complex nursing needs. Add to this mix the demands of a rapidly rising elderly population, and a deterioration in the health of many younger people consequent upon an obesity epidemic, and it is clear that pressure on the NHS will continue to build. Notwithstanding, that medical advances are continuing to deliver new, and expensive treatments.

The current furore has centred upon the 4 hour target within which to treat anyone who is admitted, or who walks into an hospital accident and emergency department. In recent weeks this measure has fallen from a percentage in the high nineties to the mid-eighties. The irony is however, that in terms of the raw numbers, more people are actually being treated within the target every day, because so many more are presenting – it’s winter again.

A word of caution when praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

Further to my remarks in this column last week, I thought I’d risk giving even greater offence. All religions are a bit ‘wacky’ and stretch the credulity of their adherents. That is certainly my own experience as a Christian. Perhaps Mormonism has got to be the wackiest of all beliefs. I can say that because Mormons are gentle people who do not easily take offence, unlike other religions where ‘blasphemy’ is perceived almost everywhere, and is punishable by death, with – or without – the necessity of any proper judicial process.

Yesterday’s ghastly assassination of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem by Daesh marks a further unwelcome and worrying ‘religious’ aspect to the conflict in Palestine. The West Bank of the Jordan has hitherto remained a predominantly secular place where women can go about their business freely, unaccompanied and uncovered. Much less so in Gaza where the Hamas and other sinister Islamist thugs hold sway.

The growing religious sensitivities on the other side of the conflict are all too apparent as a muscular Israeli settler movement increasingly treats Palestine as its biblical theme park. The Israeli interior minister (equivalent to Amber Rudd as Home Secretary) has stated that with the election of Donald Trump we are witnessing “the birth pangs of the Messiah when everything has been flipped to the good of the Jewish people”.

Alas, if you really believe that God promised you the land, there isn’t much scope for negotiation.

What I always find odd however, is the support for this position to be found amongst evangelical Christians. Later this month Parliament will be visited by ‘Christian Friends of Israel’ and I will be lobbied by a number of constituents, some of whom are convinced that the ancient borders of Israel have to be fully re-established according to God’s promise to the patriarchs, before Christ’s second coming and the messianic age can begin.

This wacky eschatology is, at least, not mainstream Christianity: Christ’s first coming was God’s final and complete revelation to mankind. All the promises of the Old Testament and the New are already fulfilled in him. There is nothing left outstanding and still to be delivered; Through Christ all humanity become the ‘children of Israel’, including the Palestinians.

So, when I ask for people to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, I ask them to do so, at least in one respect, with the intention of keeping God out of it.

Groundless accusations are water off a duck’s back. What really hurts is when you know that there is truth in them.

The vitriolic response to the UN resolution on illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and to John Kerry’s very measured speech explaining why the USA refused to exercise its veto, show that Israel is just a touch sensitive on the issue.

The reality is clear to anyone who looks at the pattern of settlement building on a map: it is removing the possibility of a viable Palestinian state that could co-exist peacefully with Israel.

Israel has persisted with settlement expansion on Palestinian land whilst the focus of world attention in the region has been understandably elsewhere, and it has, until now, enjoyed the assurance of support in the USA.

My own attitude was one of instinctive support for Israel. It is a democracy and an ally. My generation saw the Arab / Israeli wars through the lens of a David against Goliath. My attitudes were hardened by our experience of international terrorism by the PLO and our horror at what happened at the Munich Olympics. In more recent years we were disgusted by the senseless and indiscriminate suicide bombings of innocents in Israel.

We do no service to our friend and ally however, if we are silent and ignore its folly at scuppering the possibility of a two state solution, which we regard as the only prospect for its own long term peace and security.

John Kerry said that, if the endeavour to create two state solution is abandoned, Israel cannot be both a democracy and Jewish: for if the Palestinians are not to have their own state, then they will have to have all their civil rights accommodated in the state of Israel.

My fear is that a significant part of the Israeli establishment reject this logic. Rather, they believe that they can continue to occupy Palestinian land and tell the Palestinians that they must seek their political expression and representation in Jordan, or in sub-state ‘bantustans’.

The Obama administration’s pressure on Israel has come far too late, and President Trump will renew robust, perhaps unquestioning, support for Israel. So, the prospects for a two state solution, which has been the focus of US and European endeavour for so long, looks bleak indeed.
If the opportunity is lost, Israel will not be alone in bearing the consequences: we will all feel the fallout from continuing violent instability in the region.

It’s that magnificent time of year when we can wallow in the short dark days and add to the gloom with blood-curdling predictions of disasters, and all the things that will go spectacularly wrong next year. Of course, this year we’ve been able to indulge ourselves in this favourite pastime since the bright long days of the summer, when we were warned that the world would all but end for us if we voted to leave the European Union. Those predictions have now been deferred until next year. We should comfort ourselves with the reassurance that every generation in human history has thought that it would be the last one.

Actually, the definitive ending of the world was supposed to have been in 2012 when the 5000 year old Mayan civilisation’s calendar ran out. A year earlier my favourite book of all time The Coffee Table Book of Doom was published by Art Lester and Steven Appleby. Here is a flavour from the advertising blurb:
“…with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uninformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.”

I can’t speak for all 27 doom laden horsemen but at least the prospect of being vaporised in a nanosecond by an asteroid is now less likely than the book suggested because a more recent NASA study has downgraded the threat: apparently there are only half as many threatening asteroids than was previously thought.

There is still plenty to worry about. Only the other day I heard that there is a volcano under a lake near Naples rumbling away and if it blows it will make Vesuvius look like a camp fire. The lava lake under Yellowstone Park could go at any moment, taking most of the USA with it. Unfortunately ‘remoaners’ would not be able to blame either on Brexit.

With elections in France and Germany next year, and every possibility that Greece or even Italy might still crash out of the Euro, there is plenty that could destabilise one of our major export markets beyond anything that Brexit might be blamed for.

Personally, and on the contrary, even on these dark mornings I still wake up – as I have done every morning since the 24rd of June – and my first thought is “we are going to be free again, WE ARE GOING TO BE FREE!”

Last week I was deluged with emails demanding that we do something – almost anything – to relieve the desperate situation of Syrians besieged and trapped in eastern Aleppo.
George Osborne was right when, in the emergency debate held in Parliament, he pointed out that whilst intervention can have unintended and severe consequences, so too does choosing not to intervene.

I was a government whip in late August 2013 when the Government sought parliamentary authority to take punitive military action against the Assad regime after it had crossed the ‘red line’ defined by President Obama, and used chemical weapons against its own civilian population.

The difficulty we faced in the whips office was not that the situation in Syria did not demand it, rather that colleagues were fearful of what happened a decade earlier with our military intervention in Iraq.

In 2013 the emails, which now demand that we intervene, were – notwithstanding the obscene chemical attacks – demanding that we stand aside. They won the day and we have watched the slaughter from the side lines ever since. As a consequence of the decision to do nothing, hundreds of thousands have died, our allies in the region have been destabilised by the presence of 4 million refugees, and a million refugees have fled to Europe; the dreadful regimes in Iran and Russia are in the ascendant.

Even before that fateful vote at the end of August 2013, much of the damage had already been done. From the very outset of the rebellion we supported the objectives of Assad’s moderate opponents – the Free Syrian Army, but we refused to arm them. Consequently the opposition to Assad’s murderous regime became increasingly dominated by the better armed Islamist militias.

Now it is too late. Assad, his Russian and Iranian allies are triumphant. The prospects for Syria and the entire region are frightful. This is a mistake we have made before. After the first Gulf war, when Saddam’s Shia subjects in southern Iraq rose in rebellion, we stood aside while he massacred them, with consequences that lasted a generation, and continue.

The consequences of what we have now allowed to happen in Syria will also reverberate for a generation, that’s if we are lucky.

If the Supreme Court upholds the High Court ruling that legislation is required to initiate the Article 50 process for leaving the EU, then that will mean a bill must be read three times in both the Commons and the Lords. The danger is not that it will be voted down at second or third reading, rather that it will be amended during its committee and report stages.

As last Wednesday’s overwhelming Commons’ vote proved, relatively few MPs will explicitly vote against the express will of the voters. What they will do however, is put down amendments to try and constrain the Government’s negotiating position in order to emphasise or preserve particular aspects of EU membership that they wish to have retained, whether it be membership of the EU internal market, or its customs union, or whatever.

In the Commons the difficulty is reduced because the Government has a majority, if only a small one. In the Lords where there is no Government majority the danger is much greater.

The amendments will make success in the negotiations no more deliverable, but that is not their intent. The sole purpose of amending the bill will be to place obligations on the Government, requiring it to take account of the subject matter of the amendment when it negotiates.

Once the bill becomes an act of Parliament and the Government enters negotiations, questions will then arise as to whether it has complied, and taken proper account of the obligations placed upon it in those amendments. These questions can be subject to judicial review, and so you can bet that they will be. Be in no doubt, this is their strategy, this is the plan of the opponents of Brexit: they mean to tie the whole process up in legal knots.

The Government’s counter strategy must therefore, be to prevent its Article 50 bill being amended, particularly in the Lords. Experience from history teaches that their Lordships can be overawed by governments when those governments have demonstrated that they were determined to create sufficient new peers to secure the majority that they needed. Accordingly, I do hope that somebody in Number 10 is preparing a very long list of potential new peers, and is ready to leak it.

So, the Government’s appeal over its power to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to leave the EU, has gone to the Supreme Court. It is a process of which I disapprove both in principle and on practical considerations.

I was opposed to creating the Supreme Court in the first place. It was preceded by the ‘Law Lords’, more properly called the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary: they sat as part of a parliamentary process as members of the House of Lords. I was brought up with the doctrine that the ‘High Court of Parliament’ was our highest court and that no other court could question proceedings in Parliament.

Tony Blair’s downgrading of the role of Lord Chancellor and the creation of a new supreme court separate from Parliament, struck me as an unwise decision, potentially setting Parliament and the courts against one another. I believe that it is the proper role of Parliament to hold government ministers to account, and not for the judges to do so.

On practical grounds, I think the Government might have been wiser to have simply accepted the High Court’s judgement that parliamentary approval was required to trigger article 50, and to have brought the necessary measure before Parliament, rather than seeking to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Government however, believes that there is an important point of principle about the use by ministers of the Crown Prerogative, which needs to be properly settled. Well, then let it be settled in Parliament with legislation. One of the most important lessons I learnt at school was ‘if you are not going to like the answer, then don’t ask the question’.

There is now every possibility that the judges will settle the matter in a way that constrains ministerial use of prerogative powers that will have much wider restrictions on effective government. Even worse, the appeal has provided for the Scottish Executive to join in the legal action. What on earth will be the outcome if the court rules that the Government must first seek the consent of the Scottish Parliament before triggering Article 50?

‘Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof’. Perhaps it’s unwise to worry ourselves with speculations about all the things that could go wrong. It is possible, after all, that the Government might just win the appeal. In any event, hold on to your seats: we may be in for a bumpy ride; It certainly isn’t going to be dull.

Two former prime ministers and a deputy prime minister have now stepped forward in support of a second EU referendum on the grounds that we didn’t really know what we were voting for first time around.
All three were passionate in their support for the losing side in June. The notion that we didn’t know what it was really about is, in my opinion, nonsense. The Remain campaign painted the bleakest of prospects for the UK if people voted to leave.

On only one thing were both sides in agreement: the importance of the vote and its finality in settling the question for at least a generation.
Yet, I am a democrat, and voters do have a right to change their minds. I have never favoured that particular species of democracy evident in many less developed parts of the world: ‘one person, one vote, once’ …and rarely, if ever again.

I can’t say, however, I have detected any enthusiasm for re-running the referendum beyond a handful of my constituents. On the contrary, there is a frustration, expressed even by many who voted to remain in the EU, to simply get on with the process of leaving, end the uncertainty, and make a fresh start. I rather suspect that were we to oblige our former prime ministers, the result would be even more emphatically in favour of leaving the EU.
So, I am certainly not afraid of the result of a second referendum, but I do believe it would be deeply damaging to hold out the prospect of having one. The former prime ministers are incredulous that none of their dire warnings of the approaching apocalypse came true after the June referendum, nevertheless they continue to repeat them. Tony Blair says that people will demand a second referendum when they feel the pain caused by the result of the first one. (He is wrong on two counts: I don’t believe in the pain, rather I believe we will prosper; and second, even were there to be the prospect of pain, I think voters have already made up their minds and steeled themselves against it).

The problem is that a second referendum is designed to deliver the very pain that its supporters believe is necessary to deliver a reversal of the previous outcome.
Currently there are increasingly important voices in Europe pointing to the need to negotiate mutually advantageous exit terms with us. A second referendum will silence them and present the hawks – who really want to force us to remain in the union – with an opportunity to negotiate the worst possible terms for our departure, in the misplaced confidence that UK voters will reject them in the final ballot. The consequence will be that the UK will vote to leave anyway, but will do so on terms that will be damaging to Europe, and much less advantageous to us. It would be a spectacular own goal.

Mr Justice Jackson said that his ruling that a 14 year old girl’s body could be frozen and cryogenically preserved was not about the ‘science’ of cryogenics, merely a case of whether a dying minor (who cannot legally make a will), should have her wishes complied with after death, when her estranged parents were in dispute – perhaps, a defining tale of our times.
The judge did however, suggest that the Government should consider regulation of the cryogenic practices.

Psalm 90 states that “three score and ten are the number of our years” and I can understand that anyone looking at a shorter life would feel cheated, particularly a child blighted by disease. Even the rest of us, healthy, with longevity increasing every year, might envy the patriarchs who, before the Flood, lived so much longer. Adam was 930 years old and Noah made it to 950.

I don’t believe that pumping the body full of anti-freeze and storing it in liquid nitrogen is an answer. The science of re-animating a corpse is no more plausible to-day than it was when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. The £37,000 cost of preserving the body is a gamble on the prospect of future technology discovering how to bring it back to life, and then to cure it of whatever was the cause of death in the first place. It is not clear when, if ever, sufficient medical priority would be attached to such an endeavour to justify deploying the necessary resources and expertise.

Aside from the question of how one would regulate and police the industry, the danger is that the Judge’s request for government regulation, would of itself confer credibility on the practice, almost as it were officially sanctioned.

Yet the desire to preserve the body is quite normal. The ancients mummified them. Daily, billions of Christians recite the creeds stating explicitly “I believe in the resurrection of the body”. This begs all sorts of questions, including, is it the body in its prime, or old and wrinkly?

Certainly there was something different about the body of Jesus after the Resurrection: neither Mary Magdalene nor the disciples on the road to Emmaus initially recognised him (even though he bore the stigmata of the crucifixion).

In any event, faith in resurrection by divine intervention for an eternal and quite different existence, seems to me a much better prospect than an investment in an inevitably temporary re-animation, even if science can ever deliver it.

Anyway, irrespective of the judge’s request, I’m sure won’t be regulating it.