The subject of Scotland really matters little to most of the 56.0 million people of England. With some 8% of the UK total population, this is understandable. It’s also at the heart of a grievance which has been nurtured for some 90 years by some very odd political players.
I write about this because I’m very fond of Scotland, as English born and bred as I am.
I’m a Northerner, albeit born in the only Southern town in the North of England – Harrogate. In spite of this, it’s in the North Riding of Yorkshire. I was, mostly, brought up and educated in York.
My family, as far as I know, having thus far eschewed the services of the genealogical online companies, goes back to South Shields, the Borders, and Edinburgh. The happy conclusion of my father and mother’s families’ meanderings was Sunderland where they met and married.
I have also acquired through our daughter’s marriage, a new family in Scotland which is also rooted in the Borders. A happy coincidence, and one which gives me great pleasure.
Oddly enough, my wife’s cousin lives in Ayrshire. This, in and of itself, wouldn’t be at all unusual, unless one grasps the fact that they both come from a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean which has a population of under 500. To find each other some 13,500 miles from home, yet only 100 miles apart is remarkable.
I am not a dispassionate observer of the politics of Scotland, for all of the reasons described above. I have a stake, as they now say, in the business of Scotland.
I am a Unionist, and shall remain so unless, and until, I can see that two thirds of the citizens of Scotland vote for the radical constitutional change which is offered by the SNP. I say two thirds of the vote because I know that this is the legal requirement for major constitutional changes in law, for established societies in the UK, just as it is within the US Constitution for any amendment to that constitution.
A simple majority would be as inadequate as it would be contentious and would provoke an enduring resentment from almost half of the citizens of Scotland.
Putting up borders just up the road from our home in Carlisle, which we’d have to negotiate to visit our family in Scotland would be insane. Having said that, we do already have the benefit of ‘booze buyers’ from the ‘Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Caledonia’ which has boosted sales in the supermarkets near the North M6 junction since ‘Minimum Pricing’ was introduced by Mme Defarge.
Going back to the 1930s and 1940s we know that some of the prime motivators of Scottish nationalism were either supporters of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR, or both, to name but two: Arthur Donaldson and Hugh MacDiarmid. The dark origins of the SNP appear to have been discarded and deliberately concealed over the last 20 years.
I’ll leave aside most of the crimes and delinquencies which can be laid at the door of the Scottish ‘administration’/’government’ and the SNP’s intimate and fraudulent recent past.
Let’s have a look at a couple of other matters which haven’t been adequately reported about the SNP since they assumed office in Holyrood in 2007:
Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, in 2014, signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with China Railway No 3 Engineering Group, Ltd, on a £10.0 billion infrastructure investment project in Scotland. I have watched MoU’s being signed with governments on much smaller projects in a few other countries over some years. My observations lead me to conclude that prior to MoU’s being signed with a government, there’s a lot of ‘seed money’ being disbursed. Much of this will stand up to inspection as consultancy fees in legal, technical, and other areas required to establish feasibility. Quite a lot is also disbursed on ‘greasing the wheels’. On a £10.0 billion project, I’d hesitate to guess. It’s a long way from my experience of the biggest project I ever worked on - £70.0 million. I know consultancy firms who will spend up to £50,000 to get a £5.0 million contract if they’re approved and short-listed.
If I had to hazard a guess, based on what I know of spending to get clearance and agreement at the top level on much smaller projects, I’d be very surprised if China Railway No 3 Engineering Group, Ltd, had spent less than £500.0 million in Scotland before they got the MoU.
Nobody, including the Scottish press and broadcast media ever raised a single, solitary question on the subject. My estimate could be wrong. It might only have been £250.0 million. Even £100.0 million, spread around at the highest level in the SNP’s administration in 2014 is a hell of a lot of cash. It’s an airfield full of high-range campervans.
The saga of the two ferries can’t be ignored. This does typify much of the SNP’s style of government.
Back in those happy days of 2014 the SNP government signed a contract with Ferguson Marine on Clydeside to build two ferries for £97.0 million – just under £50.0 million each. The contract stipulated delivery of both ferries within two years, 2016. In 2024, neither ferry has been delivered and the cost is heading towards £450.0 million.
The BBC, unusually, attempted to offer its legally required Licence Fee Payers some value for money by giving us a documentary on this scandal in 2023. Sadly, the BBC pulled their punches and glossed over the crucial aspects of how the International Tender for Procurement procedures were perverted in the awarding of the contract.
I’ve had lots of fun trying to enforce the international tender regulations on such procurements in a few developing countries. I might as well have just ignored these as being unenforceable, which, sadly they usually were.
In short, it’s usually bent, and very rarely will an international donor contest the awarding of the contracts. I was astonished, sort of, to see that the ‘Scottish Government’ could get away with blatantly perverting an International Tender. The fact that the ‘confidential’ detailed specs were sent from CalMac, the end user, to only one bidder, Ferguson Marine, was missed out. The Scottish Government even had a QC-led inquiry which admonished them of any wrong-doing.
That’s chutzpah, in spades. I can only assume that the unhappy bidders in Poland, Turkey and Korea were adequately paid off.
The two boats in the, subsequently nationalised, FML shipyard haven’t been commissioned yet. Some six years late and at four times the contracted cost, neither is yet carrying passengers and freight for CalMac.
An under-reported, yet crucial, issue goes back to 2021 when the SNP needed the Greens to stay in power in Holyrood. The ‘Bute House’ harmonious deal didn’t mention that a condition of this agreement was that both the new ferries would be powered by ‘dual-fuel’ engines. This, some years after nationalised FML had laid the keels and built the hulls of both ‘Glen Sannox’ and Hull 803, aka MV ‘Glen Rosa’.
As a layman, having worked only with a few small fishing vessels, I have always relied on the experts - marine engineers and naval architects. Similar experts in Scotland were unanimous in saying that it would be cheaper to scrap the two hulls and start again than to adapt the engine beds for the ‘new types’ of engines. They were ignored by Mme Defarge. She concluded that, having ‘launched’ the Glen Sannox, it would be politically inconceivable to scrap the vessel and start from scratch.
It’s also true, from a reliable source close to the FML shipyard, that the prop shaft on Glen Sannox, launched by Nicola Sturgeon with painted windows, had lain on its bed, unturned, for so long, that it would have to be removed and sent off to be recalibrated/balanced before it could be fit for use. Getting this out of the vessel ain’t easy once the decks have been built. Cutting a large hole in the hull is an option. I do not know how they resolved this matter.
And then we get to another aspect of the new ‘dual-fuel’ engines. These are diesel/LNG, and quite novel. There are zero bunkering facilities for LNG anywhere remotely near CalMac’s ferry port sites.
Apart from anything else, a major problem with Liquid Natural Gas is that it needs to be stored and transported at minus 160 degrees centigrade which raises costs and a whole raft of safety issues. I’m sure that some readers will have knowledge of this. It’s reported that all contractors were ordered to stay clear of the Glen Sannox for two weeks when the first batch of LNG was loaded on board.
A problem with LNG reminds me of the old days when some diesel engines needed to be ‘primed’ with petrol before they’d ignite. Turns out that using LNG isn’t very different in ‘dual-fuel’ engines, and it needs about one hour on diesel before the LNG can work. This is possibly going to be a bit of a handicap on the busy Ardrossan ferry run which usually takes one hour each way.
As things stand, LNG supplies are going to be freighted by diesel fuelled trucks from a depot in South Wales to ports around mainland Scotland. No LNG bunkers exist on the islands which are served by CalMac. The Danish firm contracted to build the new bunkering facilities some nine years ago for £50.0 million have attempted to accommodate the new specs, although I don’t know what they’re now able to do. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that the contractors will have demanded another £100.0 million to meet the new specifications. We’re now at £550.0 million?
On a brighter note, and one which the SNP government has kept quiet, contracts for £100.0 million for two boats were placed in 2022, one of which is scheduled for delivery later this year and the other by March of 2025. A Turkish shipyard will be delivering, at £50.0 million each, two boats within two and a half years. Rumour has it that they’re also contracted for the same £100.0 million to build another two ferries.
The SNP government’s nationalised shipyard, FML Clydeside, has yet to deliver one boat into service after £450/£550 million of taxpayers’ cash has been spent, and nearly ten years since the contract was signed and the first payment made. Excluding the assumed extra investment in bunkering facilities, we’re looking at two ordinary ferries at £225.0 million each. It’s about 230% over contracted price.
The lack of curiosity exhibited by the ‘Fourth Estate’ in Scotland beggars belief. The press and broadcast media have published bits of the story. Not one of them has ever offered anything like the full story to the public.
It’s an astonishingly obvious story which isn’t too difficult to cover. All I’ve done is to dig around a little, file a few notes, and listen to friends who happen to know people working in the FML shipyard. A halfway intelligent junior reporter should have put this together well before now….unless they were told to do so? And there’s the question….
There’s so much more that I could write about the SNP’s government, from the missing £670,000 of donors’ ‘ring-fenced’ IndyRef2 cash, and the bizarre ‘Gender-woohoo’ which still features in their ghastly administration.
The former is in the hands of Police Scotland and Lord knows when we shall hear of specific charges after some three years and three months. The latter I leave to the always reliable Leo Kearse.