THE GREAT FERRIES "SITUATION"
Building the new vessels on the lower Clyde was framed as a symbolic revival of shipbuilding on 'Red Clydeside'. Instead, it sunk ScotGov credibility, failed taxpayers & dashed Glaswegian hopes
Calls are now being made for a criminal probe after the BBC’s Disclosure documentary revealed new evidence suggesting the awarding of the ferries contract to Ferguson Marine was rigged. It’s a story of political cynicism, corrupt dealings and a governing party hiding from scrutiny as taxpayers and islanders are left in the lurch. A fiasco which dashed the dreams of a city clinging desperately to the false-promise peddled by the SNP of a renewal on the Clyde
A proud city clinging to memories of a fading past
GLASGOW is a city caught up in the grandiose memories of what went before, a rose-tinted romance with the past oozes from its residents. The heart swells with pride that our home is blessed by the august magnificence of the Greek-revivalist architecture of Alexander 'Greek' Thomson. His unique take on Greco-Egyptian style bequeathed to Glaswegians his St Vincent Street Church (1859), with its raised basilica testament to his Presbyterian faith indicating Thomson’s fascination with Solomon's Temple.
Everywhere we look, we can see the legacy of one of Victorian Scotland’s greatest architects eternally caressing our eyes. It whispers to us about our past wealth, success and pre-eminence. It focuses our collective minds on that misty locale - past.
And amid the highfalutin pomposity of this, the second city of empire, lurks other more radical and less deferential memories. Take a walk down the Clyde and those of us of a certain age frequently find ourselves reminiscing about a lost industrial past.
I for one vividly recall the day Meadowside Granary was demolished, June 2002. For nearly a century it had stood as brick and mortar testimony to our industrial heritage.
The first of the building complexes first appeared on the skyline in 1912. By the 1960s it was still being expanded. In 1967, the Meadowside Granary became the largest grain store in the UK and the largest brick building in the whole of Europe. Dominating the skyline as you came off the city expressway, during the late 1960s it told the story of an Upper Clyde port still booming.
Then came the 1980s. The granary closed in 1988, living on as a relic to a lost industrial past. A red brick ghost of deindustrialisation and our lost 'Red Clydeside'.
And the memories of Glasgow’s ‘Red Clydeside’ is a powerful emotional pull. When the residents of the city recall it, they are pulled into a period of political radicalism in Glasgow. On the banks of the River Clyde, from Clydebank, Greenock, Dumbarton and Paisley the city witnessed the birth of the British labour movement in earnest. From the 1910s until the early 1930s Glasgow saw huge struggles for working class rights, protections and better collective welfare led by giant charismatic figures.
Men like Willie Gallacher would form the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC) and fight against Prime Minister Asquith in opposition to the First World War.
Others such as Mary Barbour would in 1914 alongside others form the the Independent Labour Party Housing Committee and the Women's Labour League. They would go on to form the Glasgow Women's Housing Association, which would became the driving force behind the rent strike of 1915, beginning in the industrialised slum areas of Govan. Mary Barbour and others would work to ensure tenants refused to pay the increased rents given their young men had been taken away to fight abroad in the Great War. Mass demonstrations against evictions rocked the city and eventually the whole of Britain as violent confrontations began between workers and primarily the women left behind by the soldiers and police trying to enforce evictions.
The first violent protest began in the Govan district in April, aiming to resist the eviction of a soldier's family. By August the situation was rapidly spiralling out of control as the 20,000 tenants were on strike. Chaos met any police attempting to enforce an eviction and strikes broke out in Partick, Parkhead, Pollokshaws, Pollok, Cowcaddens, Kelvingrove, Ibrox, Govanhill, St Rollox, Townhead, Springburn, Maryhill, Fairfield, Blackfriars, and Woodside.
By October trades unions threatened the government with factory shut downs - and to hell with the war. In a state of panic, State Secretary of Scotland Thomas McKinnon Wood requested the Liberal Cabinet in London to freeze all rents at pre-war levels. By December, the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act 1915 received royal assent.
These are the sorts of memories Glasgow is caught-up in an endless love with. Anyone born and bred in Glasgow, regardless of their personal politics, will admit to that tickling feeling these political memories bequeaths to us.
Ours is not just a city of towering Ionian columns and grand architecture. This is not just a city build by tobacco barons with its marble floored and mahogany wrapped City Chambers. Glasgow is not just a city of the Union, free-trade and empire. It is also the cradle of the plucky working men and women who could force Westminster governments filled with the great and the good to capitulate to the demands made by the least of us.
The ghosts of ‘Red Clydeside’ and the ferry fiasco
The problem is, that’s all in the past now. None of that really represents Glasgow anymore; a truth hard for the city to confess or admit.
Eventually the shell of that Meadowside Granary was demolished in 2002. Its fall stood out in my youthful mind of what we had as a city begun to fear was irretrievably lost. Many by 2003 had a gnawing perception that the then-Blair governments were clearly moving away from the socialist roots of the labour movement, just like our new-revamped Glasgow. For many this did not sit comfortably, and the precious few remaining institutions of that fading ‘Red Clydeside’ took on all the more emotional importance.
Vanishingly few wanted to admit this was not really the same Glasgow as Mary Barbour’s. That that political radicalism was fading - only to be replaced with a cautious gentrified bourgeoise centrism - is for too many on the left an unacceptable reality.
This is perhaps a key cultural context to understanding why the ferry fiasco concerning the Scottish Government, the SNP, CMAL and the Ferguson Shipyard could have ever happened. You see, Ferguson Shipyard, born from the ambitious four Ferguson Brothers (Peter, Daniel, Louis and Robert) dates back to 1912. Today it is the last shipyard existing on the lower Clyde, all others having given way to time and collapsed beneath the seemingly irreversible march of modernity.
It is a ‘family yard’, where the workers there all know someone in their family who in the past did or currently still does work there. Its welded deep into the fabric of the city and its immediate environs. The idea that in 2014 it was to go under meant we would lose the last Glasgow lower Clyde shipyard. An emotionally unthinkable reality to many, and thus quickly became politically unthinkable.
After all, Glaswegians - who would vote later that year to become ‘yes city’ - were being told independence meant a revival of Scotland. The SNP under Salmond was promising the city an independence that would mean rediscovering our Glasgow’s radical political tradition.
More than once I recall hearing during that toxic independence referendum the suggestion that Scotland itself would overnight somehow become a socialist-democratic paradise, if only those pesky Tory loving English could be dispensed with, to no longer hold us back.
Thus the notion on the eve of the independence referendum the SNP could permit the last Glasgow shipyard to go down the pan was politically impermissible. The First Minister of the time, Alex Salmond had to act.
Glasgow’s politically leftist movers and shakers simply had to retain the last vestiges of its industrial and politically radical past. These were more than jobs, these were Ferguson shipyard jobs - ghosts of that lost ‘Red Clydeside’.
‘Fixing things’ for the Ferguson yard
The ferry fiasco is today worse than that, it’s politically criminal and potentially legally criminal too.
This is a story where the credible allegation can be put of an SNP-led Scottish Government desperate to grant a ferry contract to keep a symbolically (and politically) vital yard afloat. The procurement simply had to go to the yard.
In August 2014 Ferguson was calling in the administrators and bankruptcy. The workers were given an hour to collect their things and go home. The receiver was being called in, tears aplenty as Glasgow’s last yard finally gave way to time.
But the next month in rode the hero, Jim McColl. He bought the yard for £600,000 and promised modernisation, 600 new jobs and a new hope that Glasgow might yet still retain its last vestiges of industrial pride. And the then SNP leader and First Minister Alex Salmond took full credit for making all of it happen. Salmond had personally asked McColl to take a look at the yard, perhaps rescue it from oblivion.
When McColl opted to take it over, the SNP must have been cock-a-hoop, given things all happened immediately before the Independence referendum votes took place.
McColl renamed the yard Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited (FMEL). He was close to the Scottish Government, seen as a friend by the SNP politicians in the corridors of power over in Edinburgh. It was clear, the SNP were heavily politically invested in the outcome of FMEL being a success story. This all manifested itself in the numerous photo-ops of SNP politicians visiting the shipyard, all smiles for the cameras.
But all fairy-tales have a beginning, middle and ending. Ours is no different. Today we discover that the wholly publicly owned Caledonian Maritime Assets (CMAL) broke their own tender rules to ensure FMEL would get the procurement contract.
CMAL had said there had to be a refund guarantee from bidders. But there wasn’t for Ferguson Marine (FMEL). CMAL Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hobbs (who joined CMAL in April 2016) told Holyrood parliamentary committees that CMAL had not known prior to FMEL winning the contract that it could not honour the mandatory refund guarantee. The BBC has since exposed this as a lie, though perhaps Mr Hobbs was misinformed by those around him as to the true facts from the time before he was Chief Executive Officer.
We now know that FMEL received a 424 page technical report to help their bid1, something no other bidder received. A key part of their bid, according to BBC reporting, was cut and pasted from this. This tells us that the fix was in, special treatment was handed out to FMEL.
Also, we now know that FMEL was permitted to change design and price after the deadline, something no other bidder had the opportunity to do. FMEL even received an in-person confidential meeting (we don’t know what was said at this meeting). No other prospective bidder had this sort of access, opportunity or special treatment2.
And as all of this corrupt dealing was going on, CalMac believed a bidder other than FMEL was better.
In short, the entire procurement process represented a fix. Ferguson was granted an inside track to ensure that they would win out in the bidding procurement process. Ferguson had to win, the SNP had invested too much of their government credibility in the yard. Promises had been made, commitments undertaken and Glasgow’s yard closing was politically toxic to an SNP increasingly dependent on west-central Scotland for its votes.
Taking taxpayers for fools
As of the 27th September 2022, Deputy First Minister John Swinney claimed that vital documents concerning this politically corrupt fiasco cannot be found. He said it will be left to the long-suffering Auditor General. ‘Honest’ John proposes we all let the Scottish Government hide behind the Auditor General, but I for one object.
If CMAL did favours for FMEL, this is because they were told to.
The situation is akin to insider dealing, opening the door to potentially costly legal action which will only further add to taxpayer woes amid the worst cost of living crisis in our lifetimes.
But First Minister Nicola Sturgeon does not see things this way apparently. While she was undertaking her tour of the Edinburgh fringe festival last August she insisted none of this represents a scandal. Perish the thought!
She told LBC’s Iain Dale in a cosy soft-ball hour long chat at the fringe that
“I take responsibility for everything that happens in government. Whether I like it or not, the buck stops with me. On everything, I don’t shy away from that. I take issue with your language there, but there is no point getting into that”
A perplexed Iain Dale inquired “what’s your issue?” Nicola Sturgeon explained
“Well, ‘scandal’. I don’t think it’s a scandal. I think there has been a situation with these two ferries that I don’t think is acceptable and we’re learning lessons from that and focusing on putting that right”3
So, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon does not believe any of this constitutes a scandal, merely a “situation”.
Perhaps its a “situation” where the Scottish Government ‘fixed’ things corruptly to ensure that their new (and formerly Labour) voters in Glasgow would stay happy? A “situation” where the political needs of the ruling party was put before the best interests of taxpayers and isolated rural island communities left abandoned to a crumbling ferry service.
A melancholic “situation” where Glaswegian hopes for a revival of its shipbuilding, fading industrial past, was peddled by a cynical SNP wishing to win a referendum and subsequently retain power and votes. Those fond collective dreams, harkening back to that ‘Red Clydeside’ now lay dashed amid mounting allegations of serious political and legal corruption. A proud city stands exploited alongside the taxpayers of the whole nation.
Ultimately this “situation” is one where although for now the police have stated they will not yet open an official investigation, perhaps things are on hold awaiting the Auditor General’s investigation. Regardless, this “situation” is will inevitably finish in a full independent inquiry.
But the suggestion CMAL somehow went ‘rogue’ without anyone in the Scottish Government knowing is not credible. I sincerely doubt CMAL would have done favours for FMEL unless it was told to. There are few names which could have had that sort of power to do so. A short list and the names on it all go to the very top of this SNP-led Scottish Government.
I don’t know about you, but the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s assurances that she has seen “no evidence” of criminality regarding this “situation”4 are nae buttering any parsnips with me. Ms Sturgeon's cries of 'ferry scandal? What ferry scandal?' is just pathetic at this point.
Conor Matchett (2022, 28 Sept), ‘Scotland ferries scandal: How the political gamble of building ferries on the Clyde sank along with the SNP's credibility’, The Scotsman, https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scotland-ferries-scandal-how-the-political-gamble-of-building-ferries-on-the-clyde-sank-along-with-the-snps-credibility-3858486
BBC (2022), ‘Disclosure Series 5: The Great Ferries Scandal’, BBC, click here
Iain Dale, (2022, 17 August), ‘Iain Dale All Talk: Nicola Sturgeon’, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, click here
Chris McColl (2022, 28 Sept), ‘CalMac ferries delayed again as Nicola Sturgeon says no proof of 'criminality' at Ferguson Marine’, Daily Record, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/calmac-ferries-delayed-again-nicola-28106036