LET me share a secret. Nobody in Scotland’s islands currently gives a toss where two new CalMac ferries are to be built. If Timbuctoo was in the shipbuilding business, that would do nicely.
That ship sailed, or rather didn’t, last year when Ferguson’s was left off the short-list. Why anyone would consider adding Hulls 803 and 804 when their predecessors 801 and 802 lie forlornly uncompleted is not immediately obvious. Since then, things have only got worse.
Just so long as the next two ferries destined for the Islay run are seaworthy, delivered to some approximation of schedule and, in the wider taxpayer interest, leave change out of £300 million, then Turkey will be our delight. But what about the future?
The two questions need to be separated. Anyone paying attention knows the last big CalMac order was a political stunt which went badly wrong. All the arguments about who is to blame are subsidiary to that fact – and the architects, notably Ms Sturgeon, should still be held to account.
However, the bigger question now is whether a strategy exists which will prevent the same thing happening in two or five or ten years' time. And the straightforward answer is that it doesn’t any more than it exists for any other industrial sector in Scotland.
More than a year ago, I wrote about a “white paper” produced by the Malin Group in Glasgow about how the resources of the Lower Clyde could be pooled and developed to re-establish a vibrant shipbuilding and marine engineering industry, using public procurement as a bedrock.
The detail was there to be argued over but the principle was visionary and deliverable. Has anything happened since? In the unlikely event of Scotland’s broadcasters insisting on an interview with Sturgeon or any minister to explain Scotland’s marine engineering strategy for the future, would they have a clue what was being talked about? I doubt it very much. How dare anyone even ask!
And that really is the problem of which ferries are but a metaphor – it’s not about an order announced last week but the steady stream of orders to be announced over the next decade. The present is a mess but are there any grounds for believing the future will be better?
Exactly the same question can be applied to another great industrial opportunity which has so far passed Scotland by. Under the Salmond-Sturgeon axis, we missed out almost completely on the economic and employment benefits of offshore wind. The developers danced rings round them.
There is now a far bigger opportunity. As in the rest of the UK, there will be huge offshore wind projects and the urgent question is what Scotland will get out of them for industry and employment. This time it does not just involve non-creation of hypothetical new jobs but protection of existing ones.
Scottish households currently dependent on the North Sea know the difference between windy rhetoric and a decent pay-slip. They are entitled to evidence of a coherent strategy to invest in infrastructure without which it will simply not be possible, a few years from now, to retain more than a fraction of ScotWind work in Scotland.
Fortunately, there is a simple test of intent – the £700 million windfall the Scottish Government will receive next month for ScotWind licences. The question has been repeatedly asked if that money will be ring-fenced for relevant infrastructure and Ministerial responses are so evasive that one suspects the short answer is “no”.
You can go through the industrial card in this way, sector by sector. Ms Sturgeon and her team really aren’t very good at anything apart from setting up boards and advisory groups. Even worse, they show minimal interest in learning from past failures.
Previous governments had industrial strategies which paid dividends for decades though not for ever. Labour’s regional investment policies and the Tories’ emphasis on foreign investment both created prosperity for many Scottish communities. If, after 14 years, the SNP has a comparable big idea, it is Scotland’s best-kept secret.
And that is why they need to keep talking up another independence referendum as their USP, even though it isn’t going to happen. Their nightmare is to be judged on their record. If that was the test, why would they gain a single vote in the beleaguered islands or a solitary council seat as reward for Glasgow’s grim decline?
The empress’s independence clothes are all that stand between the SNP and wider recognition of how many failures they have presided over, and how little they care. How long can that last?
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