Editorial

A Future Fair for All is the chosen theme of this year's Scottish Labour Party conference. One ponders whether the jingle meisters might extend their thematic rhetoric to the issues of Party Democracy, Devolution, membership accountability and open debate which CLPs and trade union delegates will be demanding from the conference floor.

The Campaign for Socialism makes no apology for joining the affiliated trade unions in what might be seen by some as a limited attempt to revitalise the Party. The Party's role as the political arm in the body of the Labour Movement could be argued to be in need of deep heat treatment to revitalise the core principles and practices of the party and to reactivate and renew a dwindling membership and trade union affiliation - a Party future fair for all.

Life in the Labour Party in the last year has been far from fair. Not fair on the anti-war majority of members and CLPs who saw their Party leadership back a hard right wing US regime and join in their illegal invasion, plundering and occupation of Iraq. Neither has it been a fair year for all those Party members and local authority Labour groups who expressed overwhelming opposition to PR for local government only to see the Scottish leadership overturn their will in a deal to cling on to powersharing with Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament. Even the section of Labour's Left who are pro-PR have been moved to oppose the policy change - ordered as it was from atop. Loyal affiliated unions such as the FBU have been ridiculed as ultra-left in their opposition to measures that threaten public safety. Party Chair, Ian McCartney could have been distinctly more flexible in the early stages of the debate within the RMT over its national affiliation to the Labour Party. The Party leadership threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Fairness must also prevail for those representatives elected by the membership onto the Scottish Policy Forum. It is simply not good enough that the Forum did not meet for a whole year, has long-term unfilled, unadvertised vacancies and then presents a report to conference congratulating itself on its pre-2003 work. Fairness in policy making should include a role for policy review and monitoring as well as formation.

And yet the opposition to Labour in Scotland has never been weaker. The Scottish Tories remain a ridiculed outmoded irrelevance. The bourgeois nationalism of the SNP and increasingly, the SSP has little penetration in working class communities. At this time, the Scottish Labour Party should be taking a radical step in protecting the interests of the Scottish working class rather than whipping up fear in our communities and criminalising young people. Scottish Labour should also be taking a strong stand against the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers in detention in Dungavel and those destitute on our streets as a result of UK government policies. With imagination we could address Scotland's demographic deficit through invitation for these people to stay in Scotland.

Let us hope that this fair future vision penetrates to the heart of the Scottish Labour Party, and isn't treated like a travelling show whereby after the fair is over the weeds once again grow over the fairground.