IT DOES not bode well for the direction of new Labour MP Jo Cox’s parliamentary career that one of her first acts is to join arch-Tory Andrew Mitchell in demanding the drowning of the Syrian nation in blood.

The nightmarish Syrian civil war, they write, is “so horrific and so inhumane that new thinking and bold leadership are required to address it.”

But their “new thinking” turns out to be the old favourite of self-interested military intervention, which only ever increases the stock of human misery.