A public-sector procurement scandal for the ages

John MacLeod has a useful Critic piece on the continuing Scottish ferries malaise.


The calamities of Caledonian MacBrayne Ltd

Scottish ferries are in a ferry bad shape

There was once a MacBrayne skipper called Duncan “Squeaky” Robertson — a master-mariner from Skye, of small stature and formidable personality, of whom many tales are told.

Like about the day in the Twenties he took the steamer Plover — a tough little ship; in 1918, she had seen off a U-boat — on what should have been a routine hop from Tarbert (Harris) to Lochmaddy (North Uist.) This was in conditions locals would have thought a bit fresh, southerners as a gale and your American as a hurricane.

The Plover duly vanished in foam and hail, never reached Lochmaddy and rumours — pre-wireless, pre-HM Coastguard helicopter, pre-satellite — fast circulated of her last seen disappearing between two enormous waves.

Then, after a day or two of fraught silence, she puffed into Kyle of Lochalsh. Ventilators were missing, ladders bent, railings mangled — her funnel heavily caked in salt as the Plover’s whey-faced passengers tottered ashore.

Squeaky leaned over the bridge-wing. “We had a bit of a breeze,” he announced laconically.

A century on, what is now Caledonian MacBrayne Ltd — Scotland’s state-owned ferry operator in the Firth of Clyde and the Hebrides — is in its own perfect storm.

An ageing fleet, incessant breakdowns, crumbling infrastructure, incessantly cancelled sailings, repeated delays and, at the Fergusons yard in Port Glasgow, a public-sector procurement scandal for the ages.

The whole piece is well worth reading as yet another example of political lessons which remain forever unlearned.