Of all the various alligators snapping at Humza Yousaf’s bum, the most persistent and damaging has been one with a long, sad history, inherited from his predecessor and showing no sign of going away. Although the contract for two ships with Fergusson Marine of Port Glasgow has repeatedly been the media focus, the saga encompasses the entire ferry fleet run by CalMac, serving the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Their entire fleet is aging, many running well past their 25-year “sell-by” date, meaning repairs to patch them up now run to £8m each year.

Despite leasing a boat from Pentland Ferries for £1m, CalMac can’t cover service commitments. The main Isle of Mull crossing to Craignure is served by a boat too small for the job; the Corran ferry serving Morvern no longer takes vehicles and the Uists have had to thole no ferry at all to or from Lochmaddy throughout June.

No matter the rights and wrongs of the Fergusson fiasco, after several lost seasons through Covid, tourism across the Western Isles is being hobbled by inadequate and unpredictable ferry services upon which much of their business—not to mention day-to-day living— depends. Whether Fergusson delivers a ferry by the end of the year, or four others that have been ordered from Turkey, none will arrive in time to salvage the summer of 2023.

The prospect of CalMac, CMAL, Transport Scotland and the eighth Transport Minister in a row to reprise their ferrets-in-a-sack show is unlikely to make islanders feel more than recycled despair.

Why is it this Scottish government can’t think big? Why do they persist in this softly-softly “progressive” strategy of electoral bribes—whether it’s baby boxes or free travel for rich pensioners? When are they going to stop carping about Westminster intransigence, show some imagination and think big for the country they want to run? Have they even looked elsewhere for inspiration?

Take Norway as an example—similar size to Scotland, even if they have been far more canny with their share of the oil bonanza. If you think our Hebrides are rugged and pose serious transport headaches, then examine Norway’s fjord-fragmented coastline, Their E39 coastal highway runs 1,100km (658 miles), linking Kristiansund, facing the Skagerrak in the South, through Stavanger and Bergen to reach Trondheim, most of the way to the Arctic Circle in the North.

Given this highway crosses fjords over 3km across and 1km deep, this needs a ferry system as complex as CalMac’s. Seven ferry services link isolated stretches of road, meaning a trip along the entire E39 currently takes 21 hours. It would be enough to redden any Scottish Transport Minister’s face to relate how reliable those ferries are, compared to CalMac’s. The Norwegians are too modest to rub this in. But they are not content with the service this provides in linking four of their main coastal cities, even though they are already linked through the country’s interior.

They want to dispense with the ferries altogether.

In an example of how a “small” country can think big, Norway is now engaged in a $47bn infrastructure project to link up all the parts of the E39 with soe serious thinking out of the box. Most of the crossings involved defy conventional engineering. So, they are inventing unconventional ones, starting with a 27km tunnel near Stavanger that will be longer and deeper (390m) than any other, when completed in 2026.

Other crossings require even more radical engineering. Nothing daunted, the Norwegian Roads Authority are considering radical solutions like sunken tubes and floating bridges to link across some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere.

This is no pie-in-the-sky along the lines of Boris Johnson’s link to Northern Ireland across the North Channel, which ignored vast amounts of munitions dumped in the Beaufort Dyke after WW2. The Norwegians are a pragmatic people, not given to flights of irrational fantasy. You can catch a video of the project at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT-FurFVLQ

It may be asking much of the present pedestrian Scottish Government to hatch such inspirational ideas for the country to match those in Norway. After all, both Bergen and Trondheim boast populations of a quarter million to justify such expenditure. But it was visionary infrastructure boosting such cities that created that size in the first place. Both have grown by half since 1990. Inverness may have doubled over the same time but, at 47,000, it is still a minnow by comparison. Stornaway (5,000), Portree (2,500) or Tobermory (1,500) don’t even get a look-in.

Also, Norway’s hefty per capita GDP of $77,500 embarrasses Scotland’s $44,100, and goes some way to explain how they can afford this project.

But we must ask whether shrewd investment is what gave Norwegians that edge. Mull’s 3,000 population may not justify a bridge from Appin, over Lismore and Morvern—yet. Now it has a bridge, Skye’s population has doubled to over 10,000. 

But unless Fiona Hyslop and Humza Yousaf put their heads together and come up with similarly inspirational concepts to show what an independent Scotland might do, their collective jaikets hang—along with the prospect of indy—by an increasingly shoogly nail.

#1073—804 words