THE COUNTRYMAN
Life can be tough for islanders and ferry cancellations make it even harder
The beating heart of our community here on Mull is the ferry. It is the metronome whose rhythm dictates the pace and timing of our lives. If it starts to falter, we falter, and over time there is a loss of confidence amongst island residents and businesses.
Over the last couple of years, the heavily subsidised CalMac have been cancelling ferry sailings with increasing frequency. Last year we were told that 10% of runs to Mull were cancelled due to weather. Whether it is weather is questionable. This February, for example, P&O ferries had no cancellations on their Larne to Cairnryan service, a hellish stretch of water across the infamous North Channel, whilst in the same month CalMac had eight cancellations on the gloriously benign Ardrossan to Brodick run, despite having many less scheduled sailings. During the winter months it seems that the ferries from Mull are on an almost constant state of ‘amber alert’, so nobody can plan anything with confidence.
This is definitely a new thing. Local people remember crossings in the not so distant past Above: Over the last couple of years, CalMac has been cancelling ferry sailings to and from Mull with increasing frequency. that were so rough it was difficult to walk around the ferry without falling over, and people were commonly seasick. And this was at a time when the ferries were smaller and less well designed to cope with rough weather.
I talk to people on other islands, such as a friend who lives on Cumbrae where the sheltered Firth of Clyde crossing takes just ten minutes, and hear stories of an unprecedented number of cancellations this year, many of them explained away by barely credible excuses.
Locally, on Mull, no one knows what has happened to CalMac. However, the suspicion is that our ferries, despite being crewed by some very well trained and able people, are joining the nationwide tendency to bow to the demands of an increasingly risk averse culture.
In Scotland, where one out of every three people work in the public sector (which is, I’m told, the highest percentage in the developed world), this legalistic approach is increasingly being allowed to take hold. The old timers who used to work as government inspectors and surveyors, for example in the maritime sector,
had sufficient life experience to be able to apply and interpret laws and regulations with realism. Unfortunately they have mostly retired or have been brought into line by a health and safety-obsessed generation which slavishly follows the letter of the law with complete disregard for the economic needs of the people they are supposed to be serving.
Anyone trying to make real things happen in the real world will soon find themselves tied up in endless bureaucratic tangles, often administered by people who have no experience of the unsubsidised world and no incentive to remedy their ignorance, so inaction and inertia are their default position. Rural businesses in particular find themselves wading through a morass of paperwork, trying to tick boxes applying to health and safety that in many cases have no practical point or common sense. Often the only point to these rules is to protect someone, often government bodies, from legal action.
No one is immune to this. The Blame Industry is big business and keeps hoards of clever lawyers nicely employed in the lucrative game of claim and counter claim. We’ve all seen the adverts urging people to make claims for accidents or misfortunes that have befallen them. It’s the get-rich-quick scheme of our times and people – particularly people running small businesses – should ignore this at their peril.
Filling in forms to show that one is abiding by the laws, often made up in Europe and far too broad-ranging and remote to have any application in common sense, has become a necessary evil of our times. Everyone must be appropriately qualified, so an oddly disconnected thinking comes into play as employers find themselves prioritising qualifications on paper over real-life knowledge in practical settings. And often we, and other small businesses I know, find ourselves in the ridiculous situation of lawyer-proofing as opposed to genuinely improving health and safety.
The rot set in at the top, with many of today’s politicians having spent their entire adult lives working within academia and the corridors of power. A high proportion are actually lawyers by trade, and are mostly urban people who have no real understanding of how hard it is to make real things happen in the real world. Yet egos and empire-building usually dictate an increase in central control, and so the academics and back room pen pushers who make up our political class do what they always do – they make more laws and add yet another layer of paper weight upon our shoulders.
Even on the rare occasions when you do find a sensible politician (and I would count our MSP for Argyll and Bute, Michael Russell, in this category), he or she finds that, despite understanding the problem and wanting to help, their hands are tied by Brussels. As I’ve found out the hard way, this is particularly the case with anything that involves food production and/or the environment, but it also applies to most areas of economic activity.
I know that only one in five Scots usually vote Conservative, but at least their win in the general election means there is some hope that the economically ruinous, yet seemingly relentless, march of government expansion into our lives may be checked a little (or at least that has been the experience of the past five years). We all need to be safe and to protect our environment, but I just wish our masters would remember that a little less regulation and a lot more common sense would go a long way to helping those wealth-creating small companies upon whom our economic future depends.
My experience of running a thriving rural start-up business is that bigger government isn’t better, it’s just bigger and more costly. I wish our ‘wisers and betters’ would learn that less is often more.
‘It’s the get-rich-quick-scheme of our time and people should ignore this at their peril’