The Right to Walk Away

It's harder to oppress someone if they can walk away

I’ll start by giving you some hypothetical situations. Take a moment to think about each one:

(1) Imagine you’re running a shelter for people in abusive relationships. Someone wants to go to your shelter saying their partner is abusing them. Should you let them in, or should you first ask their partner if the relationship is actually abusive, and only let them in if their partner says yes?

(2) Each citizen of North Korea somehow has a magic button they could press that would instantly transport them to another country that would have them, such as South Korea. Would the existence of this ability make it easier or harder for the North Korean government to oppress its citizens?

(3) In a city, local government spends £5,000 per year to educate each child. Maybe they do it well, maybe they don’t. If parents were allowed to opt out of the state system and take that £5,000 with them, using it to club together to set up their alternate education system, would that be a limiting factor on how bad the system can be?

(4) In another city, there is only one broadband supplier, who charge high prices for low bandwidth and crappy reliability. The city government want to set up a municipal broadband network. Unfortunately the regional government won’t let them. If the city government was able set up municipal broadband, would it incentivise the existing broadband supplier to improve its offering?

(5) A country, the United Kingdom, was a member of an international organisation, the European Union. The UK was able to decide on its own to have a referendum to leave the EU. If the UK didn’t have the ability to do that, but instead had to ask the EU for permission to leave, would the EU treat its member states worse?

(6) A state, California, is part of the United States of America. California doesn’t have has the right to secede from the USA, but if it did, would that mean the Federal government would have to be cautious in how badly it treated California?

What do all these have in common? They all illustrate that if a person or group has the right to walk away from a situation they find oppressive, that limits how oppressive the situation can become. The more credible the right to walk away, the less oppression.

The right to walk away, and Scottish independence

Let’s see how this applies to Scotland:

A nation, Scotland, is a member of a union, the United Kingdom. If the Scotland people (through the Scottish parliament they elect) have the right at any time to hold a referendum on independence, and to leave the UK if people so decide, does that limit how badly the UK government could treat the people of Scotland?

Of course it does, because if the UK government doesn’t treat Scots decently, they will simply leave. And that’s exactly why Westminster hasn’t given Scotland that right.

The UK was able to leave the EU without getting the EU’s permission: it didn’t need the EU’s permission to hold a referendum, and it could have left anyway without having to hold a referendum. If the EU did require its member states to get permission from it in order to hold a referendum to leave, that would in itself be a massive reason to want to leave, as it would make it far too easy for the EU to treat its members badly.

Scotland doesn’t have that. We have a Westminster government ruling over us that Scotland cannot change or get away from, without Westminster’s permission. And Westminster wants to hang on to the power to keep us locked in, against out will.

Scotland needs the right to walk away. If we had that right, then Westminster would be forced to treat us with some respect. For as long as Westminster doesn’t want to give us that right, our only option must be independence.