ANYONE visiting Stornoway last week might have been surprised to see a piper-led, fully-robed procession making its way through the town to a graduation ceremony. Rather a small place, surely, for such academic grandeur?

In fact, it was the first post-Covid opportunity for the University of the Highlands and Islands Western Isles – or, in the old currency, Lews Castle College – to honour its graduates. As I was invited to speak at the event, it created the need for some reflection.

Similar events took place from Lerwick to Perth because that is how the UHI is organised. In the early 1990s, when the principle of a Highland university was accepted, there was room for radical thought about how it should be structured.

The obvious option was to add Inverness to Scotland’s university towns. Instead, a report was commissioned from Sir Graham Hills, retired principal of Strathclyde University. He came up instead with a model which built upon 13 existing FE colleges around the Highlands and Islands.

What happened subsequently is extraordinary. Each college has retained its own local identity doing the vital work that FE colleges do. It is an under-valued sector for which I have greatest respect. However, the colleges also became part of a university structure offering graduate and post-graduate degrees.

The vast range of abilities and opportunities that these places offer should be a model for education and integration. Our own son with Down’s Syndrome went to the same relatively small complex that offers high-level tuition in a vast range of academic subjects, many of them by distance learning.

Qualifications disbursed in Stornoway ranged from Masters’ Degrees in Archaeological Studies and Sustainable Rural Development to BAs in everything from Criminology to Fine Art to Gaelic Language and Culture. The fact it is possible for students to acquire these either by not “going away” as was the historic norm, or indeed by coming into these places is remarkable.

As it evolved, UHI has become a world leader in distance learning and the model attracts a steady flow of interest from countries and regions which seek to emulate it. While a lot of bad things were happening in the early 1990s, the picture was more complex than that as UHI confirms.

As Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth was a Thatcherite ideologue par excellence but that did not stop him being open to innovative ideas and UHI was one of them. It costs nothing to recognise that – and also to ask, would it happen today? The inconvenient answer is: “Probably not”.

Like other universities populated mainly by Scottish students, UHI faces huge financial challenges because it depends on fees paid by the Scottish Government. There is no influx of Chinese students or reserved places for wealthy English ones to cross-subsidise its revenues, as depended on by institutions like Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.

Largely for this reason, three colleges – Northern, Western Isles and West Highland – are engaged in a consultation about merger; in other words, a reversal of the devolved structure. It is probably inevitable to reduce costs but there will be keen interest in ensuring that local identities and needs are respected, within the huge geographic area the merger covers.

The two most significant interventions by government in the Highlands and Islands were the creation of the HIDB in 1965 and UHI, 30 years later. Nothing remotely comparable has happened in the past 15, so an obvious question for the current Scottish Government to address, if it was remotely interested, would be: “What could we do that is equally radical?”.

Since I don’t expect them to have ideas of their own, I will try to help and where better to look than the Hebridean issue of the hour, the week, the year – lifeline ferry services on which island economies depend and are currently suffering so much from extremes of remote control ineptitude.

This takes me back to education and, particularly, the role of FE colleges. These institutions were valued so much in places like the Western Isles because they provided the skills that helped to keep young people in their home communities, or at least set them off on careers that might bring them back.

Now, through UHI, the range of qualifications on offer through these colleges is, as we have noted, far wider. But where are the jobs within the communities they serve, to match these enhanced academic outputs? The answer is that, by and large, they do not exist.

There are notable private sector success stories but there has never been any philosophy of dispersing public sector jobs to the periphery. The Edinburgh mentality, just as much as Whitehall’s, is to keep decision-making as far away as possible from people and communities most directly affected by it. Where better to start standing that mentality on its head than with ferries?

As I mentioned in my Stornoway remarks: “Anyone arriving from Outer Space, or even Europe, would surely be puzzled by what exists here. We have a ferry company serving the islands with a chairman based in Copenhagen. Its board includes nobody who lives on an island. There is another agency which procures vessels in which the people whose livelihoods depend on them will have absolutely no say. It too is uncontaminated by the presence of any islander.

“The role of islanders in this structure is entirely reserved to taking what we are given – and what we are given at present is a scandalous debacle of incompetence and failure. I say with absolute confidence that there is nowhere else in coastal Europe where remote control of ferry operations, with all local ownership and influence explicitly excluded, is accepted as the optimum basis on which to proceed. So why is this imposed and tolerated in Scotland?”.

Why indeed? So there’s a challenge for Ms Sturgeon. Go back far enough and the Liberals gave the Highlands and Islands the Crofting Reform Acts. Labour gave us the Highlands and Islands Development Board. Tories gave us UHI.

After 15 years, I’m delighted to fill the void by offering the Nationalists a big idea which could easily be made reality – a truly devolved ferry company, based in the islands and run by islanders. Too radical, Ms Sturgeon? I thought so.

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