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Mr Stacey-Hibbert, I must confess that I have read the High Court judgment – and also that I have forgotten most of it. But it seems to me (no constitutionalist) to be open to four main objections.
First, it seems to assume that the European Communities Act 1972 conferred “rights” upon the British people. On the contrary, that Act merely subjugated people and Parliament to any legislation which might be entailed as a consequence of our membership (which most MPs at the time were totally ignorant of) or which “Europe” might impose in the future. The ECA 1972 was necessary not in order to ratify the Treaty of Rome (which was a prerogative act) but in order to stop the mouths of any citizens aggrieved at being subjected to a foreign jurisdiction without their consent.

Second, the judgment wrongly assumes that the supposed “rights” conferred upon the British people as a result of EU membership, even when embodied in primary legislation, were genuine acts of the British parliament. On the contrary, as we all know, Parliament never had any choice in the matter and has been obliged to rubber-stamp any directives emanating from Brussels. Hence it seems a fantasy to suggest that primary legislation is now required to remove “rights” which in no meaningful sense were ever conferred by Parliament in the first place.

Third, it assumes without argument that the doctrine of “parliamentary supremacy” confers upon Parliament a right to surrender its supremacy (and the people’s rights) to another power. This would be a nonsense indeed: much as if one were to argue that a deed of trust included a power in the trustee to dispose of the trust property in any way he thought fit.

Finally, as David Crawford and yourself pointed out, the judgment ignores (or rather, dismisses without consideration) the point that by enacting the EU Referendum Act 2015 without any provision for referring the matter back to Parliament, Parliament determined in the most unequivocal fashion that the people’s decision was to be final. Nevertheless, it is one thing for Members of Parliament to resolve to commit the ultimate question to the people; quite another for them to vote in propria persona to leave the EU. If the event shows that our representatives cannot screw their “consciences” to the sticking point, the decision of the court effectively nullifies the referendum.

If my objections are unsound I can only hope that the Supreme Court will find better reasons for overturning this perverse and dangerous decision. The arguments put forward by the lawyers for the claimants are of that Alice in Wonderland kind that make one sometimes despair of the law as a bulwark of civil liberties. In one sense, they are so true – unanswerable, even. Yet at the same time they are so totally subversive of common sense and civil polity as to suggest that the tabloid headlines which greeted the judgment were not in fact very wide of the mark.

In reading the transcript of the judgment I was reminded of the words of Rebecca West in discussing the legalistic arguments against convicting the American-born traitor William Joyce: “The arguments that Joyce’s counsel brought against the obvious inference were peculiarly masculine; they were tainted with that decadence which befalls all human activities, art, literature, science, medicine, and law, when the game becomes less important than the rules.”