The incompetence, dysfunction and financial recklessness within Scotland’s state-funded ferries have been well aired in these pages. One component that has been largely ignored, however, is the RMT union’s part in the current unholy mess.
It would of course be iniquitous to deny the role of trade unions in fighting for the underdog and achieving acceptable remuneration and conditions for working people. But, as with any vested interest, unrestrained trade union power can damage the public good and such is the case with CalMac’s workforce. Bearing in mind their exceedingly generous pay and conditions, CalMac’s RMT personnel are no underdogs; they are a highly privileged class, exerting unwarranted and damaging influence on government policy.
Generous pay can be justified where high-level skill and responsibility is called for or work is onerous, dangerous, or living conditions unpleasant. Is the level of skill and responsibility of a CalMac steward or cook, for example, greater than, say, a care worker, nurse, teacher, bus driver, or many others? I suggest not.
CalMac’s fortnight on, fortnight off plus up to 10 weeks' paid holiday works out at a 21-week working year, which may be enhanced by overtime as sickness cover kicks in. The state-funded pension is infinitely more generous than any other in the public service. Why so? The single en-suite staterooms for each crew member, coupled with gym, messroom and steward-served meals, on a ship that ties up at night, is a level of luxury unheard of elsewhere. On a Royal Navy frigate, ratings share six or nine to a room with tiered bunks. Only lieutenant commanders and above have a tiny cabin to themselves. Only the commanding officer has an en suite. Yet those vital ships can be at sea for months on end.
But that’s not the worst of it. Successive Scottish governments have so long appeased the RMT, that, to vast public expense, the larger CalMac ships carry twice the crew actually required, terminals are grossly over-manned and the RMT dictates that no alternative be allowed to operate within the state-funded network. Why? They love nationalised industries, because they know they can run rings round generalist civil servants and ministers in a way they cannot with hard-nosed commercial managers. They know that if communities ran their own ferry services, the whole rotten system of privilege and excess would collapse to be replaced with something vastly more efficient to the great benefit of our island communities.
Roy Pedersen, Inverness.
Read more letters
- Think what we could have done with the cash wasted on the CalMac model
- We are CMAL shareholders. We should be told the truth about Ardrossan
- The CalMac ferries are better than the catamaran option
Don't blow a fortune on EVs
The Government is poised to announce a £700 million fund to encourage people to buy more electric cars, which will include cash for infrastructure such as pavement gullies for cables to enable roadside charging and grants to make them cheaper to buy.
I fully agree that the climate is changing, whether it is due to mankind's pollution or natural causes, and whether we believe and accept the most dire predictions of flooding, drought, mass migration and death the impact will be, as Ed Miliband warns, a massive impact on the British way of life.
But how will blowing £700m on a few thousand more electric cars on UK roads avoid, or mitigate, the "climate disaster" when the UK only contributes to 1% of global warming? We should be focusing on resilience.
Surely the money would be better spent on planning and constructing proper defences for the predicted weather impacts?
As well as avoiding the impacts of other countries' carbon profligacy it would be better way of achieving the economic growth we keep getting told is required to fix the other – in my view greater – day to day threats to our way of life such as poor education, obesity, lack of cheap housing, policing social media, immigration and defence.
This is what other countries are doing. For example Indonesia is moving its capital from Djakarta to Nusantara because of the threat of flooding, a huge project which will boost its construction industry by 8.5% every year until 2028.
Or is this more about shoring up Ed Miliband’s increasingly loopy environmental policy defences and providing an "off ramp" for car manufacturers who face a £15k fine for every internal combustion car sold above their quota limit?
Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven.
• George Herraghty (Letters, July 12) is upset because his local wind turbines are not turning (Herald 12/7/25)
He should be comforted when they are whizzing round and the excess electricity generated is used in the various pump-storage facilities, which can be switched on at short notice as required – for example when "the wind industry is on holiday".
David Hay, Minard.
Social security: mind the language
The piece by Citizens Advice Scotland’s Jonathan Boyd (“Why it’s vital to get social security right”, The Herald, July 12) resonated deeply with me on several levels.
As part of my 30 years of service with the now Department of Work and Pensions, I spent several years in the 1980s striving enthusiastically to introduce plain English into the department’s communications at all levels so that the maximum number of people could read, understand and respond to them. Those efforts, while initially successful, have now palpably dissipated, not only within DWP but within the public sector at large. Meanwhile, the average reading age in the UK, at 9-11 years, has remained stubbornly and shamefully unimproved since the 1980s.
Coincidentally, during the 1980s and 1990s, I worked as a voluntary adviser with the Citizens Advice Bureaux in Blackpool and later in Perth, where I witnessed at first hand how a lack of basic literacy skills and comprehension contributed so directly and fundamentally to the day-to-day difficulties of so many clients. Sadly, in this respect also, the comprehensibility of so many official communications seems not to have improved in the last three decades.
At a purely personal level, I am gratified that the CAB’s Help to Claim service also recognises the importance of the disadvantages people with hearing difficulties face; a hidden, but nonetheless very real, disability which many like myself are loath to acknowledge.
Jonathan Boyd is right; social security should be simple and accessible to all. It should not need bodies such as CAB – worthy as they are – to help navigate clients through a needlessly incomprehensible and hostile nightmare.
Iain Stuart, Glasgow.
Library assistants and economics
With regard to the decision taken by North Ayrshire Council to employ four library assistants to do the work of five librarians ("Second council cuts school librarian posts", The Herald, July 12), perhaps it would make sense to put library assistants in charge of every aspect of the council's work. We would need fewer binmen, fewer teachers and if we elected library assistants we would need fewer politicians. Now that would be a saving.
Graeme Arnott, Stewarton.
Tariff trouble for US citizens
It is widely reported that the US Customs take has surpassed $100 billion for the first time and only nine months into a fiscal year. In the main due to Donald Trump's tariffs, this could reach $300bn by the end of the fiscal year when President Trump applies yet more tariffs on August 1.
Whilst this may boost treasury receipts, do the American electorate realise that it is they who are paying?
The last major increase in tariffs exacerbated the negative effect of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Let us hope that the MAGA brigade wake up before it is too late.
Peter Wright, West Kilbride.
Who could vote for Starmer now?
On the 10 o’clock BBC News on Sunday (July 13) there was yet another report on the suffering in Gaza imposed on the Palestinians by the Israeli government. I don’t need to describe the horrendous scenes. Your readers will be only too well aware of the horrors the Gazans and their children are going through.
Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert is reported online as having said: “The ‘humanitarian city’ Israel’s defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing ... Israel was already committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and construction of the camp would mark an escalation.”
What is unacceptable from the UK’s perspective is Keir Starmer’s failure to make a statement along the following lines: “Enough is enough! I have told the inconceivably malign Benjamin Netanyahu that I no longer support his criminal actions in Gaza. And what is more I will do everything I can to stop him building his concentration camp in Gaza for the few Gazans that are left alive.”
How can any voter in the UK so much as contemplate ever voting for Keir Starmer again until he does so?
John Milne, Uddingston.
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