Scottish Government failed to learn lessons of history in trying to save shipbuilding
THERE is a bigger picture framing the Scottish Government’s role in the affairs of Ferguson Marine. This depiction goes beyond immediate indignation about its lack of transparency and exposes its poor grasp of reality. Not only has the Government an absence of vision, it fails even to benefit from hindsight: “those who fail to appreciate the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them.”
Finance Secretary Kate Forbes has identified two key planks in the Government’s argument. First, that the “missing documentation”, the justification for the sign-off on the contract award to Ferguson’s, was not a contributing factor to ferries being late, off-budget and poorly constructed. This is just wrong: had the full discussion, informed advice and related documentation been given their due significance, Ferguson Marine would not have proceeded to try to construct the ships. Alternative providers would have been engaged: and, by now, these ferries would have been plying for some five years between mainland Scotland and its islands.
Her second point is that the errant documentation provided a “missing link” that had the benefit of securing shipbuilding on the lower Clyde. In fact, it gave approval for the award of a contract to a company that was incapable of delivering on time and on budget. Ferguson’s was itself unprepared to provide financial indemnity, a selfdeclaration of unwillingness to proceed, if not inability. It is a depiction of a company that is not competitive, not even in its own skewed domestic market, failing to compete – or get beyond the starting line – in tendering processes for Scotland’s own ferries.
The ignorance displayed by the Scottish Government is staggering. It misreads recent history, and the reasons for the decline of Scottish shipbuilding. Intervention was founded on the false premise of an economic cycle, a downturn that can be reversed. But shipbuilding in Scotland was never going to recover from the terminal decline that spiralled from the third quarter of the 20th century. The Scottish economy needed reinvention that was realistic, not reimagining and reinventing a glorious past that, in fact, never existed.
Deindustrialisation has been allowed to happen without appropriate remedial action. The failures of successive Westminster and Scottish administrations date from the 1960s, testament to the inability of central and regional policies to re-profile the Scottish economy. But the SNP has been in power for 15 years. And its current defensiveness asserts that Scotland can dictate its own terms of engagement with the international economy, simply through political control.
A lasting remedy would have been to create an infrastructure of skills etc that allows economic activity to attract investment and connect to national and international markets. The SNP’S defence is that it saved jobs. The reality is, it preserved them, locked in a time-warped shipyard left behind in the international market, even the niche for shorthaul ferries. It is self-deception by the SNP and gives false hope to the shipyard workers, whose future cannot lie in the past. Professor William Wardle, Glasgow.