We are CMAL shareholders. We should be told the truth about Ardrossan

The Herald Scotland

05-07-2025

It might appear to some that Peel Ports is a property developer with no interest in operating Ardrossan as a port for Brodick. Where was Peel Ports when it could have repaired the Irish berth? Why is it not kicking and screaming at CMAL using Troon? Could it possibly suit Peel Ports for the ferry operation to move to Troon?
And as Troon becomes the port for Brodick, the increased distance will require an increase in the Road Equivalent Tariff to satisfy the increased journey length and a third ferry, heaven forbid, will be required to supply the same level of service from Troon. The proposed 42-year-old MV Isle of Arran sailing from Ardrossan over the Glasgow Fair will allow more sailing capacity than the MV Glen Sannox sailing from Troon.
Kevin Hobbs, the chief executive of CMAL, says: "We do not believe and have expressly stated that resilience at Ardrossan (given the entrance through the roundheads and turn) will never be as resilient as Troon given the open sea approach."
He forgets that a smaller, highly-manoeuvrable ferry on Troon berthing trials became pinned against the harbour wall, requiring a tug to pull her off. As a professional seaman I can assure you that the entrance to Troon is a lot more exposed than Ardrossan. If you want evidence of this please look up service cancellations by the MV Glen Sannox which even the devil incarnate catamaran MV Alfred beats. Ardrossan is more than adequate when the correct vessels are used; four are coming from Turkey soon.
Brian Wilson refers to the 95% redaction in his FoI reply citing the catch-all grounds that "the balance of public interest lies in withholding the information". The sole shareholders of CMAL are the Scottish Government ministers elected by us to represent them; that means it is ultimately the public who are the shareholders and we need to know.
Peter Wright, West Kilbride.
We are all in trouble
Ferguson Marine is still in trouble despite £500m of public money having gone in. Now a committee of MSPs has cast doubt upon its future without further investment ('Ferguson Marine needs 'urgent investment', warns committee', The Herald, July 4).
£14.2m extra has already been promised by the SNP, although it is unclear as to whether this money has been received. The MV Glen Rosa is the only work on the books and is due to be delivered around the time of the 2026 Holyrood election.
This will focus attention upon the financial record of the SNP after 19 years of rule. Has it been good value for money or a bottomless pit for taxpayers who are constantly asked for "just a little bit" more? The broad shoulders are sagging very badly.
It is not just Ferguson Marine that is in trouble, it is the entire country.
Dr Gerald Edwards, Glasgow.
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Dangerous definitions
Murdo Grant (Letters, July 4) highlights how politicians cynically use the word 'terrorist' to condemn people with whom they disagree and to justify their own illegal acts of extreme violence. A classic example was provided by Margaret Thatcher, who in 1987 described South Africa's African National Congress as a 'typical terrorist organisation'.
She was referring to the fact that the ANC had established an arms-length group called Umkhonto ke Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, MK for short; this followed the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. MK's task was to carry out a campaign of sabotage against the oppressive apartheid state that had inflicted so much violence on non-white South Africans. The campaign was directed at infrastructure, not people, though there was clearly a risk when explosives were being used that people could be injured or killed.
The first head of MK was Nelson Mandela, who had reluctantly accepted that decades of struggle and sacrifice had failed to impact the white regime. As he said at his trial in Rivonia in 1963: 'It would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our demands with force.'
Mrs Thatcher's Tories opposed sanctions against South Africa, to their eternal shame. Fast forward 20 years and Tory leader David Cameron apologised in person to Mr Mandela for 'mistakes my party made in the past'. As the saying goes: one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, and the label should be used with care.
Which is why I'm alarmed by this week's vote at Westminster, by a majority of 359, to proscribe as a terrorist group Palestine Action, which vandalised two RAF transport aircraft at Brize Norton on June 20 ('MPs back move to ban action group', The Herald, July 3). The damage to the aircraft was minimal, though it has of course been inflated for political purposes. And you could argue that Palestine Action has done the country a favour by highlighting just how lamentable is security at our military establishments; I'm sure Mr Putin will have noticed.
With the threshold for 'terrorism' now being so low, I guess I should expect a snatch squad to appear on my doorstep in dead of night if this letter is published. How very 1984, and from a Labour government.
Doug Maughan, Dunblane.
Drawbacks of foreign input
I'm grateful to Jackie Kemp (Letters, July 4) for taking the time to read my letter of July 2. But I fear she has entirely missed the point. I mention neither 'Scottish independence' nor 'EU membership'. My point was apolitical and focused on the dangers of over-dependence on inward investment and outside decision-making. Our experience of the past shows that high dependence on inward investment can be like riding a powerful bucking bronco. The ride can be exhilarating, but only while it lasts. The end can be sudden and painful.
Remember Silicon Glen? It was built up largely on the back of inward investment over three decades-plus, when Scotland was part of the EU. This involved leading corporates (many from the US) including IBM, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, DEC, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, National Semiconductor, Burr Brown, NEC, Sony and more. Where are they now? Sadly, 'no more' (cue the Proclaimers). Most were branch plants with no deep roots in Scottish soil. And most had left by the turn of the century when Scotland was still in the EU.
When conditions change multinationals adapt. They restructure, downsize, or move away. And they do that 'irrespective of the national regulatory regime they're in'. That's the point.
(PS And for the record, the EU market is not an insurance policy protecting all inward investment in Ireland. One of the largest investors – Pfizer in Cork – exports 80% of its product to the US, not Europe, and is therefore vulnerable to Trump tariffs.)
Ewen Peters, Newton Mearns.
• In Jackie Kemp's plea for an independent Scotland to join the EU (Letters, July 4), she stresses the potential trade benefits. Yet these can be obtained by joining EFTA/EEA (as advocated by Alba), without the need for the substantial annual net contributions to the EU which accession would entail.
George Morton, Rosyth.
Nelson Mandela with the late Queen Elizabeth: he was branded a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher (Image: PA)
Send migrants to Dartmoor
Sir Keir Starmer has said that he deeply regrets claiming that the UK risked becoming an "island of strangers". Why? Twenty thousand unwelcome strangers have crossed the Channel this year. Does Sir Keir not realise that these people will never contribute to our economy?
We pay the French half a billion pounds to wave the boats off from Calais. There are over 32,000 asylum seekers in UK hotels at a cost of £1.3 billion a year. There are 19,244 foreign offenders awaiting deportation. Add on the cost of priority NHS treatment and the £40,000 a year for each of the 10,355 foreign offenders in jail.
Asylum seekers (and everyone claims to be one) get £49.18 a week whilst their asylum claims are being processed. We should stop pandering to the pro-immigrant charities and migrant legal aid lawyers and put these pseudo asylum seekers in tents on Dartmoor guarded by the armed forces until their asylum claims have been determined.
The UK needs to deter illegal immigration before we do become an "island of strangers".
Clark Cross, Linlithgow.
The end of empathy
I recommend everyone reads Rebecca McQuillan's article (Now Donald Trump turns to alligators to terrorise migrants, ("Now Donald Trump turns to alligators to terrorise migrants", heraldscotland, July 3).
This is where MAGA brainwashing leads to, and is brilliantly expressed by Ms McQuillan in her final paragraph: "Mirthless jokes about vulnerable othered minorities trying to escape man-eating animals. This is what happens when empathy dies."
Willie Towers, Alford.
Time to ditch green dreams
On June 13, 2025, the UK Government announced a £500 million investment, paid for by UK taxpayers, to accelerate the development of the UK's first regional hydrogen transport and storage network. (Thankfully, most likely in the industrial heartlands of the UK – although the Scottish Government has similar ideas).
One of the objectives of this funding is to complement the £2 billion which has already been invested by the Government to incentivise production of green hydrogen in the first hydrogen production allocation round contract (HAR1). This is like the incredibly lucrative 15-year initial Contracts for Difference (CfDs) awarded to to wind farm developers.
This will mean new gas pipes being installed as well as new hydrogen storage depots. And that is on top of the desecration now being caused by the grid expansion to give us all more "green electricity".
All this taxpayer money will be going to commercial companies to hasten our journey to net zero and a low-carbon economy.
When such a fuss is being made over the £6 billion that might have been saved from welfare reforms, why is there no scrutiny of where our money is going to meet this net zero ideology?
So were proposed winter fuel cuts and welfare cuts (both now watered down) supposed to fund the net zero ambitions? Perhaps its time for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to question the sanity of Energy Minister Graham Stuart and use common sense to ditch the green dreams and balance the budget.
Graham Lang, Chairman, Scotland Against Spin, Ceres, Fife.
Accentuate the positive
I was disappointed in your choice of front page headline: 'More than £1.4 million spent on cleaning up sewage spills" (The Herald, July 4).
This is a fact, but why not emphasise the good news?
Sewage spills costs have reduced by 75 per cent in two years, from £540k in 2022 to £136k in 2024.
This might be a reflection that most wet wipes are now paper-based.
Eric Macdonald, Paisley.
Discontent over attribution
Lord David Lipsey coined the phrase "winter of discontent" ("Labour peer who coined 'winter of discontent' phrase found dead after swim", The Herald, July 4)? Very strange: I always thought the author of that phrase was William Shakespeare, in the opening line of Richard III.
Derrick McClure, Aberdeen.