CHARLES BANNERMAN: Modern Calmac ferry fiasco does not reflect proud Scottish shipbuilding past
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Clydebuilt. The very word used to be a globally renowned maritime quality assurance mark, proclaiming that a vessel came from a leading international centre of shipbuilding excellence here in Scotland.
Clyde shipyards had a proud and enviable reputation for supplying the world’s navies and merchant fleets with trustworthy and reliable craft.
In a past era the Royal Navy’s Mighty Hood was the most famous warship in the world. The 32 knot liner Queen Elizabeth was launched just 22 months after the first steel was cut. All 83,000 tons of her. The QE2 followed in the late 1960s.
But these proud days are past now and Scottish shipbuilding now seems incapable even of supplying our own domestic ferry fleet.
Ferguson Marine, Scottish Government-owned since 2019, is now the lower Clyde’s only shipyard, with precious few elsewhere.
But this rare survivor of a once mighty industry has quickly become notorious for two nautical pantomimes of a mere 1273 tons, intended to address Calmac’s ferry shortage on west coast routes. Both have now been stagnating in Ferguson’s yard for six years.
One of these embarrassments, the Glen Sannox, was actually launched by Nicola Sturgeon in 2017 – albeit with painted-on bridge windows, harbingers of the further calamities which still delay completion. Around 1000 electric cables had to be stripped out of the two boats when it emerged that several were too short to reach.
The second one, still unlaunched, is even worse. It doesn’t even have a name and sits there, rusting, as “Hull 802”.
The latest estimate of completion is 2023, if the mothballed engines work, and a contract originally expected to cost £97 million looks set to inflate to quarter of a billion of public money, or even more. Audit Scotland has further revealed that the Scottish Government approved the contracts against advice and without normal financial safeguards.
Scotland’s west coast ferries, from commissioning vessels through to service delivery, are run by a series of Scottish Government-owned companies, and the entire process is broken. Ministers are now engaged in something resembling pass the parcel with a red hot rivet to avoid being held responsible for this increasingly politicised debacle which grows arms and legs by the day.
However it’s not only vessel supply, for which we have lately turned to Turkey, that leaves many of Scotland’s island communities disastrously served by lifeline sea links.
I hear western islanders continually lamenting the unavailability and unreliability of the service on which these islands critically depend. These are operated by Scottish Government owned Calmac (Caledonian MacBrayne) whose default excuses appear to be the painfully predictable Covid and bad weather early in 2022.
There are service inadequacies of varying magnitudes right down the island chain, with one prominent local businessman describing current arrangements as the worst in living memory.
One related bone of contention in these far flung outposts has been the lack of a Western Isles resident on the board of Calmac. The captive Western Isles market has no direct say in its own destiny, and life is suffering.
I really hope that Scotland’s rail services, nationalised last Friday, fare rather better.
Click here to read more from Charles Bannermann.
