No plain sailing in tender wrangle

YOU would hate to be on a rowing boat skippered by an SNP Minister.

Paddling out to sea with one oar, Transport Minister Humza Yousaf has finally succeeded in getting CalMac tendering back where we started.

The announcement that the Scottish Government now intend to award CalMac ferry contracts directly to the state-owned company instead of going through a competitive tendering process is indeed welcome news.

It took a huge public campaign involving trade unions, crews, island communities and the Daily Record to make the government come to their senses two years ago and award the ferry contract to CalMac instead of a private rival.

Having had a rocket flare fired down their funnel, Ministers decided they had no option but to stand up against the advice of their civil service and will now write to the EU to exempt CalMac from competitive tendering.

We suspect that had they done that in the first place, it would have been granted and the whole farcical, expensive and time-wasting process of private tendering would have been avoided.

The risk now is that, with the principle of competitive tendering established, a private company will mount a legal challenge against the government for operating a ferry monopoly.

The lesson is that Ministers should never have used the figleaf of an EU directive to try to fulfil a civil service agenda to flog off the publicly-owned, if sometimes frustrating, ferry company.

Para Handy, the legendary skipper of the Vital Spark, would have made a better job of getting this policy into harbour.