But it isn't like their votes are binding on anything anyway, what would a vote to refuse to leave with no deal actually do? How will parliament negotiate with the Eu when I thought that when through the PM?
So they get a vote, what would they be voting for that would be binding on Boris that would prevent this?
Well certain types of votes are not binding upon the PM, and other sorts of votes are binding. It depends what sort of votes you are thinking of. But afaik (a) the Speaker's decision is binding (and he won't allow the new PM to use any of those methods to prevent parliament voting on either a deal or a no deal exit from the EU, and (b) the LSE legal link above explains why the PM (eg Boris) could not force it through by simply doing nothing and letting the October deadline expire.
So, bottom line - Boris would be insane to try it, and if he did try it then it would be (should be) blocked either by the Speaker or by legal action in the courts.
Understood, and the bookies' odds of it are around 3/1 (25%)
I disagree and think it is significantly more likely than that too.
Then these bookies could not have been looking at the rules of parliament or looking at the law of the country. Because according to all rules of parliamentary UK democracy, and according to UK law, Boris/anyone would almost certainly not be able to exit Europe by any such artifice as attempting to exclude all elected MP of the HoC from deciding the matter … that is simply illegal for any PM to do.
Odds of 3:1 might be a reasonable guess on whether or not Boris would actually
try any of those tactics to force us to leave by default on Oct 31st. He might
try it, but the odds of him actually succeeding will be vastly less than that (though it still might succeed if opposition MP's failed to take up the precisely correct sorts of parliamentary and legal procedures in time … but they are all receiving constant expert legal and constitutional advice on that, so it seems unlikely they would make a major blunder like that).
We should also recall that Mrs May did try quite a bit of that sort of artifice and slight-of-hand with parliament herself. She tried to run down the clock on many of the crucial votes, so that she disrupted the opposition attempts to counter what she was doing. And she did cause a lot of problems doing that. But in the end she was not able to succeed with that tactic.
.
(and by the way it was not me who offered bookmakers odds as the correct way to determine if PM Boris could simply leave the EU if he wanted to).
