The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

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N one​ of this did much good in the long term. By 2019, relations between the two had broken down, and construction work had come to a near standstill. In early summer that year, CMAL reported to the steering group at Transport Scotland that both ships were years away from delivery; that no more than six people were working on vessel 801 and no more than two people on vessel 802 at any one time.

When we were young, he took me to that bridge. What I remember is the jargon. New numbers were ‘copped’. A cry of ‘Manny peg’ meant a train had been signalled for Manchester. ‘Coffee Pots’ were elderly Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway goods engines. ‘Ju-Jubes’ were Jubilees, a class that entered service during the 25th anniversary of George V’s accession and whose engines were named after imperial possessions, famous warships and English heroes. The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name. By 1955, the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club had 230,000 members, and Allan was publishing lists of almost every mechanical moving object (I’m not sure about tractors) that could be seen on land, sea and air, devoting ABC booklets to British Liners, British Tugs, British Warships, British Airliners, British Buses and Trolleybuses, sometimes narrowing the field to sub-groups such as London Transport, Clyde Pleasure Steamers and the Battleships of World War One. There were specialist magazines – Trains Illustrated was one – as well as more ambitious books that had narratives rather than lists. He took over other small publishers; he started a travel business and took over a car dealership; he moved into offices at Shepperton in the West London suburbs, where he installed a vintage Pullman car as the company boardroom. His publishing output now had unusual specialisms that included masonic rituals: Allan was a member of three local lodges and an officer in the United Grand Lodge of England, where he served as Past Junior Grand Deacon from 1992 until his death in 2015, a day before his 93rd birthday. He started as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965, before moving to London in 1970 to join the Sunday Times and then joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. He had been a Guardian columnist for the past 15 years. He won a number of accolades throughout his career, including reporter of the year at the British Press awards in 1988 and editor of the year at Newspaper Industry awards in 1993. In 2003 there was a ruling by the European Court of Justice about subsidy or state aid for a German bus company, Altmark. CalMac, which had not been broken up at that time, received legal opinion that the Altmark ruling definitely applied to CalMac and allowed tendering to stop without legal consequence. The UK Department of Trade and Industry appeared to agree. Ministers in the Labour/Lib Dem Scottish executive, however, were advised by officials that Altmark did not apply to CalMac. The hugely expensive tendering process went ahead. CalMac was split up into different companies, including the newly created Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL).

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Oliver Luft (28 November 2008). "Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 March 2016. and little trains whirred past little stations, rattling over points, past signals, through tunnels and model cuttings. Eyes sparkling, Galland turned to Bader, looking like a small boy having fun. The interpreter said: ‘This is the Herr Oberstleutnant’s favourite place when he is not flying. It is a replica of Reichsmarshal Goering’s railway, but of course the Reichsmarshal’s is much bigger.’ By and large, Callaghan has had an indulgent press, but his own judgment of his actions can be found in the nervous breakdown, paralysis of will and complete failure to communicate with civil servants and ministers he suffered across two to three weeks at the end of 1978, going into 1979 – something related to me by his private secretary, Kenneth Crowe, but not included in the standard narrative. The 1970s are perhaps best remembered as a failure so nearly a success as to approach tragedy.

And, deep down, everyone in the SNP (outside of the Palace Guard) and everyone in Scotland who is actually paying attention knows that Ms. Sturgeon's legacy is the emptying out of that hope. But that came later. In 2015, the news was good. Travelling by train through Port Glasgow, I would look out at its familiar landmarks: the abandoned tenements, the long-closed ropeworks where my cousin Margaret used to work, the near derelict hotel where in 1964 I danced at her wedding. Among these dim memorials, how could a reinvigorated shipyard with an ambitious industrialist at its helm be anything other than cheering? The cemetery opened in 1859, when the dead of Port Glasgow outgrew their old kirkyards and could no longer be dependably counted as Presbyterians. Generations of shipyard workers have been buried here, their lives often shortened by too many shifts in the cold and rain, or squalid housing, or too much drink, or a more 20th-century condition, mesothelioma, which is caused by exposure to asbestos and has a particular prevalence in old shipbuilding towns. But as the draughtman said, ‘it’s not just bodies that die, the skills and the memory of the skills die with them.’ Spencer never seems to have considered that aspect of the resurrection: that it would be useful as well as joyful, this rebirth of so much skill in a land that had lost it. It was pleasant to imagine the resurrected brushing off the earth and reaching for their tools, the just with the unjust, the welder with the fitter, the draughtsman and the joiner, the hauder-on and the putter-in. And the possibility that Scotland could do things better, could organise a society without an irredeemable void at the centre, provides the entire content of hope for independence. On climate, however, his views are hardly controversial in Britain except on the lunatic fringe. The BBC no longer gives global warming deniers airtime to preserve “balance” as it did for so long. So why would it be partisan for the King to continue his support for green causes by attending the Cop27 meeting in Egypt? After all, his mother made little secret of her broad support for the anti-apartheid cause. It may be argued that she did so as head of the Commonwealth, but the Commonwealth countries that most vigorously opposed apartheid, such as Pakistan, are also those most affected by climate change.

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He was political but never polemical, his column-writing notable more for its accumulation of telling detail than the force of his opinions. He never forgot that he was first and foremost a reporter, and he wrote in a way that accorded the reader respect and invariably gave pleasure. He once observed that “good reporters matter in the media above all else, because without them we can never get near to confidently knowing the truth of an event.” He believed this with particular fervour in relation to the intended audience of a work; and he explored this thought with skill and insight in his book The Poet and His Audience (1984), looking at Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Yeats, and exploring the ways in which their voice, choice of subjects and tone were influenced by an awareness of the audience for whom they were writing. The ferries were busier than they had ever been, thanks to a decision by the Scottish government to implement the Road Equivalent Tariff (RET), which used a formula linking ferry fares to the cost of road transport over an equivalent distance. RET has its origins in the ferries that cross the Norwegian fjords and was first mooted in Scotland in the 1960s by the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), originally, Clark writes, ‘to neutralise decades of islander complaints about MacBrayne’s freight charges’, and later and more broadly to make the islands cheaper to access, and in that way to level up the economic gap between island and mainland living. The HIDB formally proposed the scheme to the Westminster government in 1974, to have it rejected by successive UK administrations, Tory and Labour, for the next 25 years. RET-based fares would cover only a quarter of the operating cost. The Scottish Office minister Bruce Millan reflected conventional political opinion when he argued in 1975 that the fares needed to be anchored in some economic reality or the subsidies would be uncontrollable. I was surprised and disappointed to find Ian injecting the fallacy of relative privation into his account of the SNP government's double dealing over the 'ghost ferries' of Port Glasgow. " 'It happens all the time,' people say." Yes, indeed. And much worse things are happening all over, all the time. In fact, why worry about anything Sturgeon's lot get up to when Putin's lot may be working up to a nuclear strike? In 1970, he moved to London to join the Sunday Times, then in its heyday under the editorship of Harold Evans. He was a section editor and then a foreign correspondent, specialising in India.

Complaints came from landowners with political influence as well as crofters with none. In 1919 the factor to Lord Leverhulme, who was on the verge of buying Harris, wrote that for seven weeks from January to March no cargo at all had been landed from Glasgow, with the result that for the last ten days of that time there had been no food in the local shops: ‘the people were without butter or margarine, no sugar, no bacon … The whole position is really becoming quite intolerable … If the government have got the interests of the people at heart, they must begin with the steamer question and reorganise the whole service.’ In the same year the people of Loch Skipport in South Uist complained that a community whose ‘sons and brothers have had to face the hunnish foe in a foreign land for King and Country, should be so exploited by rapacious Steamer Companies’. Does it matter? ‘It happens all the time,’ people say, implying that manufacturing industry and governments everywhere will sometimes transgress the rules of procurement, either out of personal corruption or to defend their version of the national interest. In Scotland, there is also the temptation to argue that the Scottish government’s behaviour in Port Glasgow barely registers on a scale of political mistakes and misdemeanours that also includes the Westminster government’s present ruination of the British economy. Ian was born in Edinburgh and studied at George Watson's college, where he was John Welsh classical scholar. Exempted from military service, to his great regret, because of his chronic asthma, during the war he went up to Edinburgh University, where he gained a first in English literature, and in 1946 he was appointed James Boswell fellow.

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If you build something undercover, it might cost one unit of price; when you do that in the open air to join the vessel up, it costs two units of price; and when you do that when the vessel is afloat, it will cost four units of price. Basically, we saw units being built at risk, not signed off by us and not signed off by Lloyd’s. What that meant is that, when they were inspected, there were many, many mistakes … mistakes made at the outset by the builder because it did not have approved drawings and, when the units were inspected, they were riddled with errors that had to be undone and then the job had to be done again.

Even so, CMAL had to intervene further to make sure Ferguson’s could be justified as the winning bidder. The scoring system allocated points on two scales, quality and price, and original designs submitted by Ferguson’s measured poorly on the second – they were the most expensive – with no compensating high score on the first. Conversations between CMAL and Ferguson’s produced a series of adjustments that gave the shipyard 36.5 points out of 50 for cost and 38 out of 50 for quality. It was still the most expensive, but a ten-point advantage for quality made it the overall winner – the ‘preferred bidder’. Like Weir Pumps, Clyde Blowers had its origins in steam technology. It manufactured a device that could blow soot from the boilers of steam engines – in locomotives, ships, factories and power stations – without the boilers having to be shut down. The ship or the factory could continue, the flow of steam to its engines unaffected. ‘Most of the Clyde-built ships had Clyde Blowers in them, including the royal yacht Britannia,’ McColl told me when I spoke to him in May, although by the time he bought the company its focus had shifted to coal-fired power stations. In 1992, it was the smallest of eight similar firms scattered across the world. In the following five years, McColl bought six of the other seven. ‘We ended up with 60 per cent of the world market and that included a very big market in China, where we set up a very successful factory,’ he said. ‘When I bought Clyde Blowers we were making 600 soot blowers a year. When we sold the Chinese factory, it was doing 6000 a month.’ Chancellor, Alexander (27 August 2011). "Diary – Alexander Chancellor". The Spectator . Retrieved 29 October 2022.

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I hope this reassures you [McMillan] that, in line with the 2012 Ferries Plan, the Scottish government is continuing in its commitment to vessel replacement and providing potential work for the shipbuilding industry in Scotland. In McColl’s version of events, the most spectacular consequence of CMAL’s hurry was the premature launch of hull 801. The plan had been to build the two sister ships – identical twins, as he understood it – simultaneously, side by side on the slipways. Since the working space around the slipways was cramped, partly thanks to FMEL’s new offices and fabrication shed, the yard planned to start building the ships from the stern, the end nearest the water, rather than from midships, which is more usual. This would enable materials to be supplied from the bow end rather than the narrow space at the sides. Shipbuilding changed as it contracted. His special interest was outfitting – the pieces that were added to the fundamental structure of hull, superstructure and engines – which was done in-house when the yards were busy enough to employ their own carpenters, electricians and plumbers. But now the work was outsourced to subcontractors who ‘like to add on the extras’. When ships lost money for their builders, it tended to be in the outfitting. Other losses were more particular to Ferguson’s. ‘In the old days you could talk to each other about problems you’d come across and good ways to fix them. I liked learning from people and I liked imparting knowledge to others, and for them to at least consider that I might be right.’ The mood in Ferguson’s was more confrontational – the ‘new broom syndrome’, he said. ‘They built these fancy big new offices while the guys working outside made do with portacabins, which had no heating and where you couldn’t even boil a kettle.’ There was the lesson of the midships. ‘There were boxes everywhere. It’s easy to build boxes, but they got in the way, they often needed reworking later, and we needed to build other things first.’ In a local economy now based around call centres and warehousing, apprenticeships were popular: a return to ‘proper skills’, secure employment, good wages – dignity. In 2016, Ferguson’s promised to hire 150 apprentices, but struggled to find skilled workers who could tutor them. Eastern Europe offered an answer, but when Eastern Europeans were hired and accommodation found for them, there was some local dismay, as if a patriotic project had been betrayed. The company’s then managing director, Liam Campbell, explained that ‘we get the benefit of the ingenuity of nationals from other countries who have been immersed in shipbuilding innovation for the last fifteen years where we have missed out. This exposes our workforce and apprentices to modern shipbuilding techniques, and will put us in a more competitive position in the years to come.’ In other words, Port Glasgow had to be taught how to build ships all over again. Some columnists and opposition politicians seemed to imagine a Scotland in which building ferries was an ordinary thing, insignificant compared to building, say, the QE2 or the Forth Bridge. But it isn’t ordinary. Outside defence contracts, Scotland builds almost nothing. Cars, locomotives, bridges, oil rigs, wind turbines, planes, fish-farm boats: the essential mechanics of the Scottish economy are all made elsewhere. In this context, two ferries were quite a big deal.