The launching of a new party of socialism in Scotland is a welcome and important step forward. A new party offers the chance to rebuild a campaigning socialist alternative for working class people. A party that will speak out and help to organise trade unionists, young people, women, communities facing attacks on their NHS and local services, and those campaigning against the carnage of imperialist war in the Middle East and beyond.

But it is here in Scotland that this new party must seek to make its mark.

Working class people and our communities are facing the brunt of an unprecedented assault from New Labours pro-big business policies. Privatisation is having a devastating impact on our NHS. The recent decision to reduce Accident and Emergency facilities from Lanarkshire, despite massive local opposition, was driven by the costs of Private Finance in the health service.

Working people and trade unionists are facing attacks on pensions, jobs, as well as on pay and conditions in the workplace. This year has already seen the biggest public sector strike in decades when 100,000 local government workers in Scotland, one million across Britain, took action against the removal of pension rights.

Low pay, pensioner and child poverty, sub-standard housing and job insecurity that is all the big-business parties in Scotland have to offer. The need for a principled socialist party that offers an alternative to the political establishment in Scotland has never been more important.

The International Socialists (CWI) welcomes the launch of the new party. We will work to make the party a success and central to that is to ensure it takes up the immediate concerns that face working class people in Scotland.

But this party must also seek to link the fight against low pay, war, privatisation and environmental destruction to the need for socialism. We need public ownership and democratic working class control of industry to end the fat cat privatisation of gas, electricity and our transport system. And an end to the private ownership by big business of the major multinationals that control the economy.

On the basis of a democratic socialist planned economy it would be possible to release the enormous wealth that exists to build a socialist Scotland free from poverty and inequality.

The struggle for a socialist future not just here in Scotland, but in England, Wales, Ireland and internationally is the only future worth fighting for. We ask all you all to join that movement today.

CWI Web Site