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For three years the Labour government has broken every promise in the book. Under the cover of its "social contract" with the trade unions, it has cut real wages and social expenditure and raised unemployment back to prewar levels. Faced with the worst crisis of the economy since the 1930s, it has resorted to more vicious attacks on the working class than the Tories ever dared.
Its commitment to democracy is wearing paper thin as its own left wing attempts to sabotage its devolution bill - a bill which was only introduced under the threat cf an electoral disaster at the hands of the SNP and which proposes a Scottish Assembly devoid of powers.
But resistance to these attacks is growing. An increasing number of ordinary working people are no longer prepared to put up with endless sacrifices just to save a decrepit capitalist economy. They do not accept Jim Callaghan's excuse that "socialism needs a healthy capitalist economy" or any other variant of the argument that the working class must pay for the failures of the private enterprise system.
Resistance has been all the more powerful in Scotland where it has combined with the national question to produce a more widespread, if contradictory, rejection of Labour's solutions. Together with the rejection of the government's miserable record in the face of Scotland's acute social and economic problems, has come a search for a greater degree of democratic control by the Scottish people over their own lives.
It is a savage indictment of the Labour Party that this has expressed itself in a massive growth of the SN a party whose policies would do more for the bankers and oil multinationals than for the Scottish class. The fact that neither working the Labour Party nor the SNP has managed to produce a democratic answer to the national question only serves to remind us that there can be no democracy without socialism and no socialism without democracy.
The growth of resistance to the Labour goverment has brought with it a tremendous ferment of political ideas, a tremendous questioning. We believe that this can be turned into a
positive force for socialism. But this requires a fight. It requires information, socialist education and, above all, socialist answers.
Scottish Socialist has been produced by members of the Scottish Labour Party as a contribution to this fight. We believe that the formation of the SLP was a vital first step. It has shown that Labour's traditional responses do not have to be accepted for ever. It has shown that an alternative is not only desirable but also possible.
Scottish Socialist aims to provide the reportage. analysis and debate which can light the road from today's first stirrings of resistance towards a real socialist society.