It sometimes seems that, like death and taxes, frustration with the problems that beset Scotland’s ferry services will always be with us – on our Letters Pages at any rate.
Earlier this week, a reader expressed his dismay at the news that Caledonian MacBrayne’s contract for the west coast lines was likely to be renewed without going out to tender.
That in turn prompted a spirited defence of CalMac by a resident of Rothesay – saying that the real villain is the Scottish Government.
Today, however, a correspondent argues that Westminster needs to share the blame.
Iain Cope of Glasgow writes:
"John Ferguson is correct to draw some of the fire from CalMac. I come from Rothesay and remember how unfair some of the criticism was.
However, to then simply blame the Scottish Government is to stick one's head in the sand and ignore the fiscal situation, whereby the Scottish Government was set up to be so dependent on Westminster that it cannot deviate much from the UK mean.
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As I have mentioned before, the amount of wealth that Scottish assets have delivered to the UK has been vast. Why do we still have second-rate infrastructure, including the ferries and ports? I submit that most of this wealth has ended up in the pockets of multinationals, in redundancy payments to the workers whose industries were destroyed in the last 50 years, and in world-class infrastructure... for London.
The ports and ferries (among much else) have been crumbling for decades, and there are simply not the fiscal tools for any Scottish government to do much about it. At least they usually try, and the ordering of six new ferries (two in Scotland and four in Turkey) is something, even if only a sticking plaster.
If the two ferries in Port Glasgow had been delivered on time and on budget, it still would be nowhere near solving the myriad problems caused by successive Westminster governments' neglect of capital investment all over the country. For decades. Except for London, of course.”
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