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.

I thought that the daftest Brexit offering, was the demand by opposition MPs and one (now former) Conservative MP, that the Government share its EU exit negotiating strategy and objectives with the House of Commons. As one of my colleagues put it “I just wish I had had the opportunity to play high stakes poker with them”. As I’ve said before in this column, if you really want a particular thing out of a negotiation, you don’t reveal it, on the contrary, you show that you are absolutely indifferent about it, otherwise your counterparty will raise his price accordingly.

Now however, Tim Farron has revived an earlier demand for a second referendum: One at the outcome of the article 50 negotiations, so that people can decide to either remain, or to leave on the basis of the negotiated terms.

There is a small fly in the ointment: So far, we have been told that article 50, once invoked, is irreversible (indeed the High Court based its recent judgement on this very fact) and that the EU won’t negotiate with us at all until we do invoke article 50. There is therefore, no logic whatsoever to any post article 50 referendum, because the moment we invoke the article there is already no going back, even if a subsequent referendum result demanded it.

(Of course, this could all change with the Government’s appeal to the Supreme Court).

There is another glaring problem, obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a moment: The EU does not want us to leave; holding another referendum at the end of the negotiations presents the EU with an opportunity to offer the most dreadful terms imaginable (including cutting off its own nose to spite its face), confident that these terms will be rejected in the referendum.

Of course, that is the objective of those that propose the second referendum: they want to reverse the result of the first one, so perhaps Tim Farron isn’t daft at all, but he must think that we all are.
The notion that we did not know what we were voting for on 23rd June, and that we need a second chance to get the right answer, is not untypical of elites who disparage and distrust democracy.
The Remain campaign painted a picture of the ‘hardest’ Brexit imaginable. They told us that not only would the Leave campaign’s extra billions for the NHS never materialise, but that on the contrary, we would be too poor and too denuded of NHS staff to afford to have an NHS at all. The voters didn’t fall for it. They have made their decision and it is now the responsibility of all democrats to get on and implement it.

The National Park Authority has issued a quite extraordinary notice on the Latchmore ‘restoration’ planning application: It says that it is minded to grant approval (the actual decision will be taken on 15 Nov), but that it supports my request to the Secretary of State to have the application ‘called in’ – given “the unusually high number of objections and the widely perceived view that the Authority has a prejudicial interest in the application”.

I would have thought that the unusually high number of objections would be proper grounds to reject the application, or at the very least to examine why so many people are so opposed to it.
As for the perceived conflict of interest, I’m glad that they have finally spotted it: not long ago we were just being told that it was routine for planning authorities to determine their own applications. Which is true, but then, this is no routine application.

The 40 or so pages of the High Court’s ruling can be summed up in three sentences:
The 1972 Act joined us up to the EEC;
Article 50 invokes an irreversible process that leads automatically to our leaving the EU;
Therefore, if ministers – using the prerogative power of the Crown – initiate article 50, the result will reverse the provision of the 1972 Act, offending the constitutional principle that prerogative power cannot reverse an act of Parliament.

They key issue as to how we now proceed to deliver the referendum result, depends on the remedy to the High Court judgement. There are three possibilities.

First, the Government wins its appeal in the Supreme Court and carries on to negotiate the terms of our exit.

Second, it loses, but it is judged that a resolution of both Houses is sufficient to authorise the Government to invoke article 50. I am confident that this could be delivered quickly – although it could be messy in the Lords. Voting against such a resolution would require an MP or peer to explicitly oppose the referendum result, which is a tall order and I estimate that few would be so foolhardy.

Third, it is judged that such a resolution is insufficient, and that a full act of Parliament is required. This does really get us into dangerous territory. Opponents could cover themselves by supporting the bill at second reading, but then delay and derail the process by seeking to amend the bill during prolonged committee and report stages, by trying to tie the Government down to a specific negotiating strategy. Nick Clegg has already announced that the Liberal Democrat peers will do exactly that.

In such a scenario the obvious way out would be to dissolve Parliament and settle the contest in an election. Press speculation already suggests that this is what the PM will do. As I have pointed out in this column previously however, calling an election is no longer in the PM’s gift http://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/begging-for-an-election/
and would involve jumping through a complex set of hoops.

Clearly, the best way out is for the Government to win its appeal. Whatever happens, it’s not going to be dull.

Despite what you may see of the gladiatorial contest for half an hour every week at Prime Minister’s questions, overwhelmingly the smooth and orderly functioning of Parliament and our legislative process works on goodwill, co-operation and understanding.

The vacancy on the Justice select committee was a Labour vacancy. It was a matter for the Labour Party to fill it. Whether I approved or disapproved of their choice, the choice was theirs to make.

The ill-considered attempt by rogue colleagues to interfere with Labour’s choice and overturn it, could have had disastrous consequences for all the other areas where ‘give and take’ are necessary to ensure the Parliament can function without always descending into an unseemly row.

Had Labour voted to veto a Conservative choice for a select committee, I would have been incandescent with rage. Accordingly, I voted to uphold Labour’s right to make its choice, whomsoever they had chosen.

The discovery that one of the children admitted to the UK from the Calais Jungle turns out to be a 22 year old student from Kabul University, reinforces the lecture that the President of Afghanistan gave me, and about which I wrote in this column last week: Some of his people are bravely taking the fight to the Taliban, whilst others are giving up and running away.

The United Kingdom has sent many of its own sons and daughters to fight the Taliban. I asked the Home Secretary in the Commons last week, if she would bear the President’s words in mind, when deciding which priority cases are most deserving of our support.