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From the ruler of a world Empire, Britain has declined to become the 'sick man of Europe'. Decades of migration, chronic housing, lower wages and higher unemployment have provoked in many Scottish workers a desire for fundamental change. The failure of Westminster to deal with these problems has led many to see self-government as a way out of the mess.
To those workers who have turned their backs on the Westminster circus we say: We are with you in trying to put something better in its place; we are with you in setting up an elected Assembly without further delay. However, we are also for a totally different kind of Scotland: a socialist Scotland and a socialist Britain.
Today, with the Devolution Bill defeated, the Labour Government is playing an intolerable game of delay and manoeuvre. The Labour Party Conference, the Trade Unions and the vast majority of Scottish working people want an Assembly. The Labour govern ment has shown it can't be relied on to deliver the goods. We stand for a united campaign of the labour movement to ensure the Assembly gets set up.
We defend the right of the Scottish people to decide their own form of government. But will life be any different just because an Assembly is set up? We believe nothing will change unless working people organise to fight for their own demands and impose their own solutions on our real rulers - big business and the multinationals. An Assembly is just as likely to introduce its own version of the Social Contract, and the Scottish MPs who voted for hospital closures in Westminster are just as likely to do so in Edinburgh.
If the fight for an Assembly is to be any use at all to working people, our "representatives must be made accountable to the people who elected them. We stand for workers' democracy: for the right of recall of elected representatives and the right of working people to control their own parties and organisations.
We believe that only the presence of socialist representatives mandated to use the Assembly as a platform to rally working people to a united fight for socialist policies can make an Assembly more than a useless debating shop.