Ferries report tells us so much about how mediocre Scotland is run

Anyway, the report is clear that the current governance structure involving Transport Scotland (i.e. the Scottish Government), CMAL (the procurement quango) and Caledonian MacBrayne has been a disaster “enabling a pass-the-parcel culture in which no one takes ultimate responsibility for the effective delivery of taxpayer-funded ferry services”. A pretty damning indictment.

This “tripartite arrangement” arose from alleged EU insistence (of which I have never been convinced) on separating infrastructure from operations to facilitate a competition to run services, with Transport Scotland as overarching parent.

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This theory never matched reality since no competition resulted – just the separation of responsibilities which proved chronically inefficient and fabulously expensive.

At present, the Scottish Government plans to repeat the same empty process before CalMac’s contract runs out in 18 months' time. It is paying consultants £5 million to tell them how to do it. I have no idea why since, as you may have noticed, we have left the EU. So who is insisting now on the same process? I don’t know and neither does the committee.

“It is regrettable”, says their report, “that discussion on future ferry services has, for the entire length of this inquiry, been hindered by uncertainty as to whether the tripartite arrangement is, in some form or another, still required for legal reasons.

It is unclear to the committee why the Scottish Government does not yet have this clarity. It is also regrettable that the situation has continued while community consultation on Project Neptune has been carried out”.

If the phrase “beyond belief” was not redundant in this saga, it would be applicable here. The Scottish Government is shelling out millions to consultants and going through the motions of consultation while unable to tell a committee of MSPs whether that process is driven by legal obligation or simply the political/ civil service preference to maintain a structure in which “no one takes responsibility” and power remains firmly in Edinburgh, which really is key to all this.

Project Neptune, the attentive will recall, was a long drawn-out distraction when the Ministerial answer to everything was they were waiting for Ernst & Young, in return for a quarter-million quid, to deliver this magical guide to the future which turned out to be a desktop study of how ferries are run elsewhere in the world. Any comparators involving private sector, local authorities or fragmentation were promptly ruled out by Nicola Sturgeon, leaving only the “tripartite arrangement” or some variation thereof.

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This latest report, while unable to identify the legal basis of the current intention, plays into the game by expressing preferences within the “tripartite” parameters. In particular, it proposes “assuming the functions of CMAL within the Transport Scotland ferries team” while giving CalMac a ten-year contract to run services.

In other words, the separation of powers would continue with even more control handed to the utterly discredited Transport Scotland, answerable to whichever transient, not greatly interested Minister happens to be passing at the time. That is the answer to absolutely nothing and will be greeted with dismay in communities which have long suffered under Transport Scotland’s arrogance.

Equally, the idea of giving CalMac a ten-year contract will be met with suspicion. I heard the chief executive of Stòras Uibhist, the community landowner, describing it on radio yesterday as “mad” to give this vote of confidence to “a failing organisation”. That would be true if CalMac continued without fundamental changes, starting at board level and location, which the report skirts round. But if not them, who else?

Let’s never forget amidst all other diversions that it is the Scottish Government’s culpable failure to perform the basic task of providing enough vessels that created this crisis. CalMac are at the sharp end and the cynics in Edinburgh are happy to leave them to take the flak. But it is not CalMac who failed to provide the ferries, whatever their other failings.

The report recommends “starting again from first principles” but does not follow through on that promise. The “first principle” should be the obligation of government to enable island communities to survive and flourish through an adequate transport system and to recognise that the best way of achieving that is through a structure run by the people and for the people from within communities directly affected.

Instead there is the polar opposite philosophical belief within the Scottish Government that decision-making should be kept as far away as possible from affected communities and certainly not located within them. It is, as I have said before, a classic, sustained mentality of internal colonialism and anyone claiming to respect “first principles” must challenge it head-on.

They should also, as a first principle, have called out a rotten-to-the-core public appointments system which draws on a servile network of multi-quangoteers who drift from one role to the next, conditional only on challenging nothing. When did we see Erik Østergaard, the Copenhagen businessman who chaired CMAL before being handed the same job at CalMac, on the front line? Would any of this have developed if islanders with stakes in their own communities were in positions to raise the alarm?

This is not just a story about ferries. It is about how Scotland is run – mediocre, centralised, reckless with public money and incapable of pursuing radical reform with the sustained commitment needed to make a difference. No cross-party committee can be expected to pass that judgement. That is a job for the electorate.