Your Right to Decide

For the right to decide to be real, it must be able to be exercised

A right without a way of exercising it is no right at all; and a right whose use can be vetoed does not really belong to the people trying to use it.

The Scottish Government believes that the core principle is that both whether to have a referendum, and what to decide in a referendum, if one is held, are decisions for the people of Scotland, and the people of Scotland alone, to weigh up, to consider and to choose to make.

The Scottish Government’s position is that it secures a democratic mandate to negotiate with the UK Government a transfer of power for a lawful referendum whenever the people of Scotland, following a party’s clear manifesto commitment to the holding of a referendum, return a Scottish Parliament that supports the holding of a referendum and a Scottish Government committed to delivering one.

That is what happened at the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary elections, and the UK Government responded appropriately.

That did not happen following the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary elections. A majority of people in Scotland thought that the election had delivered a mandate for a second referendum.^[60] Instead, the then-Prime Minister wrote to the then-First Minister refusing to enter discussions about a transfer of power. He wrote:

“ … I cannot agree that now is the time to return to a question, which was clearly answered by the people of Scotland in 2014.”^[61]

Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, 2022

In the Scottish Government’s view it is for the people of Scotland alone, through their votes in the ballot box, to determine whether “now is the time” for them to again exercise their right to decide their constitutional future.

The Scottish Government believes that any failure to recognise a decision by the people of Scotland, in response to a party’s clear manifesto commitment to a referendum, is incompatible with claims that the UK is a voluntary Union, and claims to support the people of Scotland’s right to decide their constitutional future.^[62]

The Scottish Government believes that in circumstances where a clear decision has been made by the people of Scotland to hold a referendum, it is for both the Scottish Government and the UK Government to acknowledge and respect that decision by beginning inter-governmental discussions intended to provide a constitutional, lawful way to fulfil the instruction of the people.

So far, the UK Government has decided, as it is lawfully able to, not to do so. The UK Government has also not set out the circumstances in which it may do so in the future. The Scottish Government does not believe that this position is consistent with support for the people of Scotland’s right to decide.

As one of the fathers of the Scottish Parliament and the devolution settlement put it:

“What if that other voice we all know so well responds by saying, ‘We say no, and we are the state? Well we say yes – and we are the people.”^[63]

Canon Kenyon Wright, Scottish Constitutional Convention, 1989