Rusting, decrepit, and just not fit for purpose... ferries are a metaphor for SNP Government
AGENTLE hour in front of the TV watching Countryfile on a Sunday evening is not meant to stir you to anger. But this week’s episode was enough to drive viewers to despair about the state of Scottish governance.
As its many loyal followers know, the programme puts the spotlight on life in rural Britain. On Sunday evening, its reporter tom Heap was sent to the West Coast of Scotland to investigate the ferry chaos afflicting our most remote island communities.
Speaking to the programme’s many millions of viewers across the UK, presenter Charlotte Smith noted: ‘As age takes its toll, the ferry service is crumbling.’
To get a sense of what was happening on the ground, Mr Heap visited the island of Arran. As he met four families to get their take on the impact of the ferry chaos, his incredulity over the way they had been treated by the distant government in Edinburgh mounted visibly.
All were proud of their island and talked up the quality of life there. But they all had been let down.
First up, Robbie Crawford, the proprietor of a local hotel, related how he had lost £60,000 of bookings because of cancellations.
Then, nearby grocery store owner Clair Reeves spelled out the day-to-day consequences. ‘today, we had a situation where we had all sorts of customers looking for milk. Apparently, there was no packaged milk on the island.’
A staggered Mr Heap responded: ‘I mean – no milk? that’s one of the real basics. that’s a real staple.’
Miss Reeves’s husband, Stuart Fraser, was next. He had set up Arran’s first craft gin company and bar five years before. the ferry chaos was wrecking that too. During Easter weekend, when the ferries were down, his bar was empty. ‘My staff were standing around looking at each other when we should have been serving tables.’
Anyone thinking of starting a business on Arran should be aware of the challenges, Mr Fraser warned.
Finally, we heard from David Henderson, a livestock farmer. Such was the unpredictability of the ferry service, he revealed he had now begun selling his calves a month earlier than normal ‘just to make sure they don’t get stuck’.
Mr Heap’s disbelieving reaction to these stories was telling. How had this been allowed to happen? Who was to blame? What was going on?
Perhaps those of us in Scotland who have spent months reading about the neglect of our island communities and the failure to replace and renew CalMac’s ageing fleet have become inured to the scale of the SNP’s betrayal of Scotland’s islands.
People seeing it for the first time, however, see it for what it is: a scandal of monumental incompetence.
Hamstrung
It comes as the latest ferry service broke down last week, this time to the island of Harris. It is the same problem. the average age of CalMac’s fleet is 24 years and the vessels are not fit for purpose (recently, one CalMac boat, the MV Clansman, was found to have 50 square metres of corroded deck steel in the engine room, a metaphor for the SNP Government if ever there was one).
The latest Harris closure has resulted in shops rationing food and passengers sleeping in their cars.
Shown across the UK, at least the Countryfile piece may have punctured the myth, held by many Left-leaning types in England, that somehow Scotland under the SNP bathes in the sunlight of a caring, progressive administration. It doesn’t.
The ferries fiasco shows it is hamstrung by a centralised government and incompetent ministers who have failed in the most basic of tasks – helping people and goods get from A to B. Hardly progressive.
The manner in which our island communities have been let down Shows that Scotland under the auspices of the SNP Government can be judged one of the most heedless and regressive nations in Europe.
How revealing it is that those SNP politicians who claim to represent the islands, and who can normally be found searching under every rock for a grievance, have fallen silent on this homegrown scandal.
The chaos for islanders is set to continue: the managing director of CalMac ferries, Robbie Drummond, has acknowledged that the disruption will continue into next year. Only then is the first of the two SNP Governmentcommissioned ferries on the Clyde likely to be ready, four years late and as much as four times over budget.
The SNP leadership will be hoping it can quietly move on from this mess and that most people on the mainland won’t care. A few lessons should be learned first.
The first is the most basic: is it too much to ask that the Scottish Government actually governs? As Mr Drummond notes, what he needs is longterm funding from Edinburgh to improve the reliability of older vessels. that should be forthcoming immediately.
Secondly, let us hear an acknowledgment from SNP Government ministers that public services are exactly that: services. they are there for the people they serve; in this case, the people who live on Scotland’s islands.
Again, it doesn’t seem much to ask, yet at every stage of the SNP’s management of our ferry service, this simple premise has been ignored. Instead, ministers have prioritised their own backs. this is most obviously the case with their keenness to throw money at, and nationalise, the Ferguson Marine yard in Port Glasgow which is building the new ferries. that might have been justifiable if the process had been well managed. Instead, the project fell into chaos.
As the Scottish Daily Mail has reported, other shipping companies could have, and have, built ferries more quickly and at a vastly cheaper cost.
Indeed, ministers have turned to yards in turkey to build two new Islay ferries. But operating a service at a reasonable price for customers was never the priority.
From Alex Salmond to Nicola Sturgeon to Derek Mackay, SNP ministers dashed to the yard as often as they could to claim their intervention had ‘saved the Clyde’. there are more votes there than on Arran, after all.
Cosy
And finally there is a need to probe Scotland’s bloated and self-serving quangocracy. In the case of the West Coast and Hebridean fleet, the taxpayer funds CalMac Ferries Ltd (which operates the ferries), CMAL Ltd (which owns them and leases them to CalMac) and transport Scotland (which awards the contract). All have their boards and their placemen and women.
They all look certain to stay in post: keen to avoid another row with unions, the Scottish Government is minded to keep this cosy arrangement intact without putting anything out to competitive tender. Cosy doesn’t do it justice.
As is often the case in public sector Scotland, any innovation or change is dismissed as a nasty intrusion to the way things are done. Worse, it’s seen as ‘privatisation’.
The hardship being faced by the businesses, families and farmers on Arran, and on the other islands across the West Coast, is not something to be greeted with a shrug as just ‘one of those things’. It is the direct consequence of bad government in Edinburgh.
When even the mildmannered presenters of Countryfile are left scratching their heads over this debacle, this national embarrassment should be confronted.