John Swinney commits to removing final Rosyth-Dunkirk ferry obstacles
First Minister John Swinney gave a personal commitment to overcome any remaining obstacles to re-establish Scotland's ferry link between Rosyth and Europe.
The SNP leader was asked in Holyrood on Thursday to make sure 'bureaucracy' does not prevent the route reopening as early as next year.
Green Mid Scotland and Fife MSP Mark Ruskell raised the ongoing campaign in parliament, urging Mr Swinney to 'take the lead'.
Responding, Mr Swinney said: 'I'm very happy be to involved, although I'm confident the transport secretary will be able to do all on this that I could contribute.
'The government would welcome this and we will do everything we can to remove any obstacles that are in the way.'
Mr Ruskell welcomed the answer, telling The Courier he hoped bringing the necessary decision makers together could allow a resolution to be identified.
We reported previously that the UK Government's new Brexit reset could provide a simple solution to the outstanding border control issues.
Dunfermline and Dollar Labour MP Graeme Downie suggested the agreement would remove the requirement for a border control post – necessary due to Brexit – where animals, plants and food arriving from Europe would be inspected.
It was estimated installing such a post could cost up to £3 million.
But it is believed a simple change in the law could allow facilities in nearby Grangemouth to be used as a temporary border control post until the full effects of the deal become reality and no post is required.
The previous ferry link between Rosyth and Zeebrugge ended seven years ago after a fire onboard a vessel.
Businessman Derek Sloan, of Ptarmigan Shipping, is the driving force behind the recent proposals to revive the route – known as Project Brave.
He secured an agreement for the route between Fife and Dunkirk, but uncertainty over the remaining obstacles, and funding for the new border control post, meant the plan was put on ice.
Mr Sloan welcomed the commitment from the first minister, saying: 'It's good that they've finally made a decision to overcome these barriers.
'It's common sense that if we need to use a border control post while the legislation is changed, why would we spend £4 million on a new facility that will be closed down?'
It is understood operator DFDS is looking to restart the route as early as next year if the remaining challenges can be solved.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. In an era when, for most ordinary people, Sunday was their only day off, clergy insisted on the shuttering of galleries and museums. In a noted Court of Session case – with consequences, generations later, for the Western Isles – it was finally ruled that the good and respectable folk of Burntisland, most conscious of their goodness and respectability, could not ban the Sabbath visits of excursion steamers. In 1875 the Religion and Morals Report for the Free Church General Assembly railed that, to a large extent, 'our farm servants are ignorant, licentious, profane and rude'. What yokels might have thought of Free Church ministers is not recorded. Meanwhile, Presbyterians grew so obsessed with the demon drink that, by the Great War, many congregations celebrated Communion with non-alcoholic wine. And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. Life in somewhere like Lewis or Tiree is, as someone once said with feeling, like living on the deck of an aircraft-carrier. Snow can fall on Ben Nevis in any calendar month of the year. And, even were it otherwise, the Climate Change Committee seems to be blithely unaware of the real menace: deer. The deer population on Britain, as Patrick Galbraith details in his rather good book about Brit-ain's vanishing birds - In Search of One Last Song - is completely out of control: two million beasts on the trot, the highest in a thousand years. The ideal on a well-managed Scottish estate is five deer per square kilometre – on some, numbers are at an unsustainable twenty per kilometre. The depredations of muntjac alone have wiped out the nightingale in many parts of England. Deer threaten the survival, too, of black grouse, ptarmigan and the capercaillie. They are, additionally, responsible for many fatal road-accidents; and there is no more ferocious foe of forest than browsing Bambi. But households remain reluctant to buy and cook venison – and, absurdly, much of the venison for sale in Britain today is imported. In any event, most of us eat less red meat these days, not least because it is so expensive: you will struggle to buy a family-sized pot-roasting cut for less than a tenner. And in the Hebrides, well within living memory, it was a rare treat: fish and potatoes all week, with meat (and the related broth as the first course) on Sundays. There are other environmental realities that seem to have eluded the Climate Change Committee. Without cattle, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England has pointed out, 'there would be no dung, which would vastly reduce the presence of dung beetles in their habitat. 'As well as delivering a myriad of ecosystem benefits, such as sequestering carbon into the soil, dung beetle larvae are a key food source for ground-nesting birds. It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
JIM SILLARS: SNP settled for mediocrity and paid the price with this result
The by-election: two winners, one major casualty and a lot of questions answered. Against a background of anger in a 'Broken Britain' alongside 18 years of a SNP government (the last ten seeing ferry fiascos, a failing NHS, declarations of a housing emergency without emergency action, falling school standards and more time spent politically on trans identity and dodging the definition of a woman than on child poverty) the electorate in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse gave their verdict. There is a sea change taking place in UK and Scottish life. People have had enough of the virtue signallers; they are fed up with lectures about what they can and cannot say; they have come to despise spin as a substitute for action; they are no longer afraid of being labelled bigots and racists for strongly opposing illegal immigration. Reform has caught that tide, and their Hamilton by-election and local equivalents is the result. Reform, which came within 869 votes of the SNP, accomplished its two objectives: find out if it could pass the acid test of significant support via the ballot box in Scotland, and if so, become a serious participant in the Scottish political scene. It enters the fray for the 2026 Scottish general election in the happy position of having a base, no government record to be attacked on, and opposition parties not understanding that it has risen because of their failures allied to their woke agenda and still clueless on how to combat it. If the parties Reform now threatens do not grasp their contribution to its advance, and stay with their by-election tactic of denouncing it as 'racist' and 'poisonous,' they will make the same mistake as the Democrats in the USA who, in demonising Trump, failed to realise that they had substituted lecturing to the people instead of listening to them. Perhaps even the Greens will look at their derisory 695 votes at Hamilton and reflect on the role they have played in the lecturing game at Holyrood. The big winner was, of course, Labour, who took the seat. The announcement of the result must have been sweet music to the ears of Anas Sarwar and Jackie Baillie, given all the pundits fell for the John Swinney claim that they were being outclassed and heading for a poor third place. Being umbilically attached to the unpopular UK Labour government was thought to be their fatal weak point. That proved not so. Even with a candidate who, as his reading of his victory speech showed, is not exactly inspirational, they took a safe SNP seat. What makes Labour's win important is that Hamilton is smack in the middle of the central belt, where lies the seat of Scottish political power, and where the SNP-Labour contest will be settled. A repeat of Hamilton in 2026 and Labour will be, at least, a minority government or the majority in a coalition. But for the SNP this was a very bad result. John Swinney, whose manifest failure to read the street shows a man with a tin ear and poor judgement, unfit for the leadership role the misguided SNP membership put him in. Their 7,957 votes at 29.4 per cent share of the vote was down by 16.8 per cent and much lower than the 33 per cent they have been getting in opinion polls. The old adage you reap what you sow remains true. The Sturgeon legacy of elevating mediocrity above talent turned the SNP government into a calamity for Scotland. On every issue that matters to the people, tax, jobs, education, housing, health, roads not built, and chid poverty they are failures. They got the defeat they deserved. Under the dead hand of Swinney there is more of that to come.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
TOM HARRIS: A sigh of relief for Anas - but don't be fooled by Farage's failure to win
It is easy to see why the SNP often underestimates its traditional opponents in the Scottish Labour Party. But after Thursday's spectacular result in the Hamilton by-election, John Swinney 's party would be well advised not to repeat this strategic blunder. The smiles of Labour's victorious campaign team, including its new MSP, Davy Russell, were all too genuine, if tinged by an element of relief. Anas Sarwar's party, after all, had been written off in this contest, not least by the First Minister himself, who repeatedly warned voters that the by-election was a two-horse race between the SNP and Nigel Farage 's insurgent party, Reform UK. But if there was such a two-horse race between those two parties, it was for second and third place. Labour's victory will inject some much-needed confidence into its campaign to unseat the SNP at Holyrood next May, an effort that was looking increasingly forlorn as Keir Starmer 's one-year-old Labour administration at Westminster became ever more unpopular. But there is again a spring in Mr Sarwar's step this weekend, just as an ominous dark cloud has appeared over the head of John Swinney. The nationalists ought to have seen this coming. The late Christine McKelvie, whose sad, premature death caused the by-election in a seat she first won in 2011, was a popular figure in her party and in her Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency. But world-weary strategists of any party know only too well that voters' sympathy for the loss of an MP or MSP, however sincerely felt, rarely translates into votes. The SNP's shameful record in government at Holyrood for the last 18 years played a much greater role in voters' judgment. And that does not bode well for Mr Swinney as polling day next May draws nearer. Expect Scottish Labour to remind Scots at every opportunity, in the next year, of the ever-lengthening catalogue of SNP policy failures, from historically-high NHS waiting lists to dodgy ferry contracts, from the fall in Scotland's international reputation on education to its disgraceful record on drug deaths. The result in Hamilton has boosted Scottish Labour's self-belief that it might actually draw the SNP's long hegemony finally to a close. But as the two traditional political enemies warily circle each other, firing insults and defending their own records, Thursday's third placed party demands some attention of its own. Who could have predicted, even a year ago, that a brand new party that scraped barely seven per cent of Scots' votes at the general election would come within five per centage points and 1,500 votes of taking a seat in Labour's former working class heartland? Aside from Labour's electoral resilience, the core message from Lanarkshire this week has been that there is, after all, an opportunity for a right-wing alternative to the SNP-Labour duopoly to attract the support of disillusioned and fed-up Scots. That will be frustrating to the Scottish Conservatives and its new leader, Russell Findlay, who, despite consistently and effectively holding the SNP government to account week after week at Holyrood, failed to tun that into votes in Thursday's by-election. Nigel Farage isn't exactly a new arrival on the political scene; most people hold strong views about him, one way or the other. To say that he is a divisive figure is like saying Donald Trump might not be everyone's cup of tea. But his party, Reform UK, looks likely to set the heather alight, even in left-wing, right-on Scotland. That there has always been a large section of the electorate who didn't buy into the high-immigration, high-tax, progressive vision of Scotland has never quite been proved, partly because of the reluctance of such people to vote for the Conservatives. Polling evidence suggested Scottish attitudes to immigration were little different from those in the rest of the UK, but that did little to dent Scotland's reputation as an exceptionalist haven of moderation and tolerance. Now voters have been offered an electoral alternative to the Tories, and with it the chance to disrupt the cosy consensus that has prevailed north of the border since devolution was born. Will they take it? The Scottish parliament elections will not be like a by-election, where the eventual winner can have little impact on how Scotland is governed. Will Scots really place their trust in – and their crosses against – Reform candidates? What is fascinating about the Hamilton result – and for the SNP, chilling – is that while Reform came from nowhere, and where Labour's vote since 2021 dropped by just two per cent, the SNP saw its support slump by nearly 17 per cent, much of that, we must assume, going to Reform. The establishment parties should avoid being lulled into a false sense of security by Reform's failure to win on Thursday. There's a new player in town and if it's still around by next May, the consequences for both Labour and the SNP could prove devastating. And entertaining.
