It seems sensible, to me at least, to postpone leaving the EU until we know exactly what it will mean to us. If the British parliament vote not to invoke Article 50 on the back of a European court ruling, that is democracy at work.
Problem is - we may never know exactly what a No Deal Brexit means to us until it actually happens.
Sure, there's some short term events that we can likely predict - there'll be some snarl ups at the border as we have to go back to checking goods coming over from the continent for the first time in decades, and there'll be some price rises as the additional tariffs on European goods get passed down to the consumers.
But the medium and long term effects are going to be dependent on the decisions made in response to Brexit by a bunch of corporate entities, and governments domestic and foreign.
Will a bunch of manufacturing companies leave Britain and move to the continent because they feel they need tariff-free access to the EU market (for their customers or suppliers)?
Will a bunch of city service providers leave London and move to Frankfurt because they feel they need to maintain EU passporting rights?
Will we be able to put in place compensatory free trade agreements with other large trading partners? Will our government be willing to make the regulatory and procedural changes to facilitate those? How are we going to regulate everything - workers' rights, environmental rights, agriculture, medicines - once we're on our own?
Anyone on any part of the political spectrum who claims to know the answers to all those questions is lying. And I highly doubt we'll really get an answer to those questions until and unless it actually happens.
This is secondary to the issue of 'Can the UK parliament vote not to invoke Article 50 in the light of a likely No Deal scenario'.
But the answer to that would seem to be fairly obviously....yes, yes it can, that's the very essence of a parliamentary democracy. And the voters would soon get a chance to reward or punish their MPs for doing so should it happen.
