There are three reasons why the Ferguson Marine scandal is not going away any time soon – and must eventually be answered for, writes BRIAN WILSON.
The first is these two hulks lying at Port Glasgow with vague dates for completion and costs rising towards £300 million – enough to keep every Scottish foodbank in groceries for decades to come.
Second, the consequences are directly impacting upon most communities served by the ageing Caledonian MacBrayne fleet and will continue to do so for years ahead.
Perhaps most dangerously, the third is that [former Dumbarton-based businessman] Jim McColl and his team – whose yard was effectively expropriated by the Scottish Government – have no intention of forgiving and forgetting, as confirmed by the indictment published this week.
To date, the Scottish Government’s line has been that they gave the yard the contract with best intentions, to save shipbuilding on the Lower Clyde and, ok, things went wrong but intentions were of the best and it will all be sorted eventually. To the casual observer, that sounds plausible.
However, this document is not about whether the contract should have gone to Ferguson’s but what happened next – and the astonishing failure of Ministers to intervene at various points when damage limitation could have been achieved and the ferries completed.
Its opening complaint is that the Holyrood Committee which tried to investigate the debacle failed to call three essential witnesses. These were Ms Sturgeon, the former Finance Secretary Derek Mackay and the Director General of the Economy, Liz Ditchburn.
I’m sure wild horses would not have persuaded Ms Sturgeon to put in an appearance while Mr MacKay was in hiding. So limited are the powers of Holyrood committees that they probably assumed these barriers to be insurmountable. But how could the Director General of the Economy, no less, avoid being called to account for the biggest economic fiasco in the history of devolution?
The report states: “The Ministers who were called to give evidence were at no time involved during the period of the dispute between FMEL and CMAL and were not competent to contribute to this crucial aspect of the inquiry”. That sums up how seriously these committees are taken.
Then there was the inexplicable failure of the Scottish Government to knock heads together when relationships broke down between CMAL, a wholly-owned quango, and Ferguson’s. We are told Mr McColl met Ms Sturgeon at Bute House as early as May 2017 to plead for that intervention.
When CMAL refused to become involved in a mediation process, the report states: “It was to our complete astonishment that the Scottish Government did not take a stronger line with CMAL and insist they take part in mediation, expert determination or arbitration. They had the authority to do this, and a duty to intervene, given the potential catastrophic consequences, which had been clearly highlighted to the First Minister … why were they afraid to challenge CMAL?”
An answer is then suggested: “Our chairman was shocked and dismayed when Derek Mackay told him
he could not do this because Ministers had received a legal letter from the CMAL board, threatening to resign en masse if the Government interfered …. Mackay said this could be politically very damaging for the Government, and he could not intervene”.
The former Ferguson management call for a judge-led inquiry into the whole affair. If £300 million and – in the opinion of this report – the death rather than rescue of shipbuilding on the Lower Clyde does not merit an inquiry, one wonders what does.
My own preference would be for a wider remit. So many questions have been raised by recent events, as well as the Ferguson impasse, that there needs to be a full appraisal of why things have gone so catastrophically wrong with ferries.
These questions involve the profligate waste of public money, the security of every business and job dependent on reliable services, the future of Scottish shipbuilding and its supply chain … the list goes on. As Mr McColl’s team suggest, it will be essential for all witnesses to turn up – under oath.
Ferrytale world of the dysfunctional SNP government.
JUST WHAT HOLYROOD NEEDS – AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
There have been some very good maiden speeches at Holyrood over the past few weeks – including several by MSPs with real-life, first-hand knowledge of their subjects, which is always a help.
Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy on disability and the SNP’s Emma Roddick on mental health were good examples. These are policy areas in which there should be plenty room for cross-party working.
However, I suspect the “specialist” speech which might have jolted Ministers and civil servants came from the new Tory MSP, Russell Findlay, who has made the unusual transition from investigative journalism to politics. He knows where bodies are buried.
Mr Findlay’s opening salvo, alleging that “injustice is rife in modern Scotland” deserves at least as much cross-party concensus as the aforementioned subjects – because we should all be against injustice, should we not? But a lot of vested interests might take a different view.
Mr Findlay declared: “While injustices will always occur, they are compounded when there is no redress and no accountability.Too often, public bodies use unlimited funds to crush legitimate complaints, wage war on whistleblowers and use non-disclosure agreements to hide the ugly truth from the paying public. Bad faith, back covering and secrecy contaminate too many of our institutions.”
I look forward to Mr Findlay elaborating often and in detail. The forensic skills of journalism – particularly in his specialism of investigating organised crime – are all too rare at Holyrood.
Worryingly for Ministers, there is nobody else to blame. As Mr Findlay said: “The injustices I am speaking about are entirely made in Scotland. This Parliament has the power to fix them”. Can we have cross-party support for that?