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The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Why have we let the RMT wreck our ferry services?
Generous pay can be justified where high-level skill and responsibility is called for or work is onerous, dangerous, or living conditions unpleasant. Is the level of skill and responsibility of a CalMac steward or cook, for example, greater than, say, a care worker, nurse, teacher, bus driver, or many others? I suggest not. CalMac's fortnight on, fortnight off plus up to 10 weeks' paid holiday works out at a 21-week working year, which may be enhanced by overtime as sickness cover kicks in. The state-funded pension is infinitely more generous than any other in the public service. Why so? The single en-suite staterooms for each crew member, coupled with gym, messroom and steward-served meals, on a ship that ties up at night, is a level of luxury unheard of elsewhere. On a Royal Navy frigate, ratings share six or nine to a room with tiered bunks. Only lieutenant commanders and above have a tiny cabin to themselves. Only the commanding officer has an en suite. Yet those vital ships can be at sea for months on end. But that's not the worst of it. Successive Scottish governments have so long appeased the RMT, that, to vast public expense, the larger CalMac ships carry twice the crew actually required, terminals are grossly over-manned and the RMT dictates that no alternative be allowed to operate within the state-funded network. Why? They love nationalised industries, because they know they can run rings round generalist civil servants and ministers in a way they cannot with hard-nosed commercial managers. They know that if communities ran their own ferry services, the whole rotten system of privilege and excess would collapse to be replaced with something vastly more efficient to the great benefit of our island communities. Roy Pedersen, Inverness. Read more letters Don't blow a fortune on EVs The Government is poised to announce a £700 million fund to encourage people to buy more electric cars, which will include cash for infrastructure such as pavement gullies for cables to enable roadside charging and grants to make them cheaper to buy. I fully agree that the climate is changing, whether it is due to mankind's pollution or natural causes, and whether we believe and accept the most dire predictions of flooding, drought, mass migration and death the impact will be, as Ed Miliband warns, a massive impact on the British way of life. But how will blowing £700m on a few thousand more electric cars on UK roads avoid, or mitigate, the "climate disaster" when the UK only contributes to 1% of global warming? We should be focusing on resilience. Surely the money would be better spent on planning and constructing proper defences for the predicted weather impacts? As well as avoiding the impacts of other countries' carbon profligacy it would be better way of achieving the economic growth we keep getting told is required to fix the other – in my view greater – day to day threats to our way of life such as poor education, obesity, lack of cheap housing, policing social media, immigration and defence. This is what other countries are doing. For example Indonesia is moving its capital from Djakarta to Nusantara because of the threat of flooding, a huge project which will boost its construction industry by 8.5% every year until 2028. Or is this more about shoring up Ed Miliband's increasingly loopy environmental policy defences and providing an "off ramp" for car manufacturers who face a £15k fine for every internal combustion car sold above their quota limit? Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven. • George Herraghty (Letters, July 12) is upset because his local wind turbines are not turning (Herald 12/7/25) He should be comforted when they are whizzing round and the excess electricity generated is used in the various pump-storage facilities, which can be switched on at short notice as required – for example when "the wind industry is on holiday". David Hay, Minard. Social security: mind the language The piece by Citizens Advice Scotland's Jonathan Boyd ('Why it's vital to get social security right', The Herald, July 12) resonated deeply with me on several levels. As part of my 30 years of service with the now Department of Work and Pensions, I spent several years in the 1980s striving enthusiastically to introduce plain English into the department's communications at all levels so that the maximum number of people could read, understand and respond to them. Those efforts, while initially successful, have now palpably dissipated, not only within DWP but within the public sector at large. Meanwhile, the average reading age in the UK, at 9-11 years, has remained stubbornly and shamefully unimproved since the 1980s. Coincidentally, during the 1980s and 1990s, I worked as a voluntary adviser with the Citizens Advice Bureaux in Blackpool and later in Perth, where I witnessed at first hand how a lack of basic literacy skills and comprehension contributed so directly and fundamentally to the day-to-day difficulties of so many clients. Sadly, in this respect also, the comprehensibility of so many official communications seems not to have improved in the last three decades. At a purely personal level, I am gratified that the CAB's Help to Claim service also recognises the importance of the disadvantages people with hearing difficulties face; a hidden, but nonetheless very real, disability which many like myself are loath to acknowledge. Jonathan Boyd is right; social security should be simple and accessible to all. It should not need bodies such as CAB – worthy as they are – to help navigate clients through a needlessly incomprehensible and hostile nightmare. Iain Stuart, Glasgow. Library assistants and economics With regard to the decision taken by North Ayrshire Council to employ four library assistants to do the work of five librarians ("Second council cuts school librarian posts", The Herald, July 12), perhaps it would make sense to put library assistants in charge of every aspect of the council's work. We would need fewer binmen, fewer teachers and if we elected library assistants we would need fewer politicians. Now that would be a saving. Graeme Arnott, Stewarton. Tariff trouble for US citizens It is widely reported that the US Customs take has surpassed $100 billion for the first time and only nine months into a fiscal year. In the main due to Donald Trump's tariffs, this could reach $300bn by the end of the fiscal year when President Trump applies yet more tariffs on August 1. Whilst this may boost treasury receipts, do the American electorate realise that it is they who are paying? The last major increase in tariffs exacerbated the negative effect of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Let us hope that the MAGA brigade wake up before it is too late. Peter Wright, West Kilbride. Should Keir Starmer get tough with Benjamin Netanyahu? (Image: PA) Who could vote for Starmer now? On the 10 o'clock BBC News on Sunday (July 13) there was yet another report on the suffering in Gaza imposed on the Palestinians by the Israeli government. I don't need to describe the horrendous scenes. Your readers will be only too well aware of the horrors the Gazans and their children are going through. Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert is reported online as having said: 'The 'humanitarian city' Israel's defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would be ethnic cleansing ... Israel was already committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank and construction of the camp would mark an escalation.' What is unacceptable from the UK's perspective is Keir Starmer's failure to make a statement along the following lines: 'Enough is enough! I have told the inconceivably malign Benjamin Netanyahu that I no longer support his criminal actions in Gaza. And what is more I will do everything I can to stop him building his concentration camp in Gaza for the few Gazans that are left alive.' How can any voter in the UK so much as contemplate ever voting for Keir Starmer again until he does so? John Milne, Uddingston.
The Herald Scotland
06-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Just think what we could done with the cash wasted on the CalMac model
While avoiding the big picture of catamarans' superior cost-effectiveness, Mr Turbet tries to make a case for large live-aboard crews on a number of frankly tenuous grounds: shift working and stewards helping disabled passengers on to lifeboats. In an emergency, surely any crew member or fellow passenger would have a duty to help in such a circumstance. Such issues, however, are nothing to do with the monohull versus catamaran comparison, but with management and operational practices, CalMac's being singularly costly while providing a less than optimum service. In comparison, council-owned monohull ferries operating on Shetland's frequent inter-island services have minimal shore-based, shift-working crews and operate efficiently for significantly longer hours daily than CalMac; likewise, privately owned Western Ferries, with one route, four ships and exemplary reliability and which incidentally also pays tax to support public services. Mr Turbet finishes by extolling the virtues of 'the public model's ability to divert resources where they are needed', as compared with an operator serving just one route. Well, if CalMac's record of network capacity constraints and chaos is his desired model, I fear for the future of our island communities. There is, however, a better way – catamarans, minimal shore-based crewing, multi-ship frequent crossings and gradually-introduced debundled route tendering, preferably to community-owned entities. Roy Pedersen, Inverness. Read more letters What's the value of human life? It is quite remarkable that an amendment to decriminalise self-abortions until birth in England and Wales was considered in the same week as new legislation seeking to decriminalise assisted suicide in the Westminster Parliament. Similar initiatives are also being examined in Scotland, as mentioned by Hannah Brown ("Labour MP calls for Scotland to decriminalise abortion", June 29). It is, therefore, appropriate to ask what is happening in our modern society; why have many members of the general public, and their representatives in Parliament, given up on the concept of the value of human life? A societal paradox seems obvious. UK and Scottish government funding has been quite rightly provided to support extremely premature infants, while initiatives are considered to enable abortions until birth. Similarly, financial support is rightly being provided to prevent suicides, including amongst young persons, while new assisted suicide legislation is being considered. In all this confusion, it is worth asking why human life should be valued. Certainly, from a purely scientific perspective, human beings have no value whatsoever since they are just made up of about 70 per cent water and a few other biochemical compounds. Do human beings then have value because they have autonomy? But this would mean that some lives, such as the unborn and those with very serious mental disorders, are worthless. Moreover, how can the autonomy of persons, logically, give them any worth? Maybe the value of a human life comes from the amount of pleasure or suffering it experiences. But why should the activation of certain sensory cells in the brains of individuals give them any greater worth? Moreover, if pleasure is all that mattered, it would mean that all persons in society would have lives of unequal value. So where does the value of human life come from, including that of politicians who adjudicate (after a few hours of discussion) whether some of those around them have lives unworthy of life, which can be ended? But perhaps politicians in Parliament only exist to support the concept of a social contract where everyone should equally respect each other. But why then should the strong and powerful respect such a contract? And why should anyone care if no one has any value? The only possible answer to the question of why human persons have worth, lies in the belief that every human person has immeasurable value. A belief that everyone should share in a secular society if it is to remain civilised and not descend into a jungle of barbarity. In this regard, it was distressing to see so many MSPs disparage personal beliefs in the debates on assisted suicide in the Scottish Parliament. They ought to have realised that it is only because they, themselves, share the belief in the value and the equality of all human life, that democracy and the Scottish Parliament actually exist. Dr Antony Latham (Chair); Dr Anne Williams (Vice-Chair); Prof Dr Robert Minns (Honorary Chair); Dr Calum MacKellar (Director of Research); Dr. Danielle de Zeeuw (Senior Researcher), Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, Edinburgh. Why the EU is struggling Ian McConnell's article rehashing tired Brexit regrets ("We're all still paying price for hard Brexit", June 29) does so in defiance of mounting evidence that the EU's internal contradictions are being brutally exposed. Donald Trump's proposed high tariffs on EU exports are not reckless bluster – they are a response to long-standing covert trade barriers and regulatory protectionism that have helped the EU run persistently high surpluses. The irony? Britain experienced the same treatment, yet was told to accept a £121 billion goods trade deficit with the EU (2023) while paying £10bn net annually into the EU coffers. And this wasn't a global pattern. The UK's goods trade with the rest of the world was broadly in balance, underscoring how structurally skewed our trade relationship with the EU had become. The bloc's protectionist barriers – and rigid regulatory alignment – consistently undermined British competitiveness. Unlike Britain's previous passivity, the US has now acted decisively. And with Fortress Europe under pressure, countries like Italy, facing economic malaise and rising populism, may well look to strike their own deals with the US, bypassing Brussels entirely. Germany, meanwhile, long enjoyed the advantages of an artificially weak euro, supercharging its export dominance. But that model is now unravelling: a struggling car industry, falling Chinese demand, and crippling energy policy are exposing deep vulnerabilities. A weaker Germany means a less cohesive EU. Outside the bloc, Britain is free to strike deals. Like, for example, trade deals with the US, India and the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), which may be modest today, but they align us with the fastest-growing economies of this and the next generation. They represent flexibility and global engagement – exactly what Brexit was meant to enable. The EU is now discovering how 'difficult to negotiate with' it has become – only this time, it's not Britain acquiescing but America swinging a hammer. Ian Lakin, Aberdeen. Debt worry for Scotland The latest figures on Scotland's debt makes grim reading: average household unsecured debt is running at over £16,000 and more than 475,000 people are on benefits, while 810,000 16-64-year-olds are economically inactive. There needs to be radical change to stimulate employment and a return to work in order to get us out of the financial rut that the SNP has allowed Scotland to sink into. Dennis Forbes Grattan, Aberdeen. Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump (Image: PA) Please support these rabbis It is tragic for humanity that two men have appeared on the world stage at the worst possible time and place. One whom I am referring to is Benjamin Netanyahu. The government of which he is Prime Minister is responsible for murdering and injuring some 50,000 children (Unicef). That would keep most people awake at night. But no: he and his fanatical supporters press on, planning more suffering, more cruelty, more murdering of children, more clearing Palestinians off their land, destroying their infrastructure. The other is Donald Trump. I do not need to list the ways in which he is singularly unfit to be 'leader of the free world'. I was however going to suggest he is unfit to be President of the United States, but that is a decision for the American electorate to make, once those who voted for him come to their senses. I mentioned in my letter published on June 29 that one of the positive elements in this unfolding tragedy is the many Jewish Israelis 'who defy courageously their government by working for peace and justice'. There are many such groups and I suggest that we can respond to their courage by providing them with financial assistance. I give one example only, that being Rabbis for Human Rights, who, driven by 'the profound Jewish values of responsibility for the safety and welfare of the stranger, the different and the weak, the widow and the orphan' provide aid for Palestinian communities facing state-backed settler violence and ethnic cleansing. There is a website for British Friends of Rabbis for Human Rights. John Milne, Uddingston.
The Herald Scotland
24-04-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Why on earth are CMAL and CalMac still so stubborn about catamarans?
By every relevant performance measure Pentalina was superior to Finlaggan, for example, 45% less power and 43% less fuel per car space and about one-third of the capital and operating cost. In practice too, Pentalina had demonstrated better manoeuvrability, seakeeping, safety and reliability in service. One would have thought that the CMAL and CalMac representatives who attended the conference would have seen the presentation as a golden opportunity to explore this superior technology. Instead, they complained to the conference organisers that they had been denigrated and complained to Professor Baird's university principal that the paper should not have been presented. Since then, CMAL has had several opportunities to commission efficient catamarans and rejected them on a series of fantastical grounds, not least in the case of Arran, where it could have had two for about a twentieth the cost of Glens Sannox and Rosa, and they would have easily fitted Ardrossan, with only relatively inexpensive linkspan modification. In fact, when you think about it, Arran could still have two such drive-through cats within two years plus the linkspan upgrade for about £45 million. In other words, much less than the proposed £80 million reconfiguration of Ardrossan harbour to accommodate the infamous Glens, for which CMAL could always, I suppose, recoup the scrap value. Roy Pedersen, Inverness. Read more letters Second homes plan not the answer I wonder which financial genius dreamt up the idea that the doubling of council tax on holiday homes would improve the stock of 'affordable" housing for local first-time buyers ("Local tax on second homes may double in tourism hotspots", The Herald, April 23). This year's valuation of our modest cottage on Arran would suggest it is certainly not in that category. But consider what would happen if we did decide to sell up: Caledonian MacBrayne would lose our near-monthly fare income. Local restaurants would lose our regular evening income. On short breaks, we eat out far more than any locals do. Children's attractions such as the petting farms and the crazy golf would lose out as my grandchildren would no longer use them. Janey's coffee shop at Duchess Court would certainly suffer (hope she appreciates the plug!). Food suppliers would lose our business on longer holidays. Golf clubs will lose vast amounts of money, which they can ill afford. You get the idea. Affordable housing is the responsibility of local authorities and they must make the necessary provision. Driving out long-standing holiday home-owners will not solve the problem. John NE Rankin, Bridge of Allan. Don't blame religion I read Carlos Alba's wide-ranging column ("So we may not be alone... now what does that do to religion?", The Herald, April 23) with interest. The debate about the possible discovery of life on other planets and how that influences arguments about the existence of God could be interesting. However, his assertion that religion is central to 'many of the world's problems and to so much bloodshed and suffering' is a simplistic and lazy analysis of historic and current wars. Nationalism, racism and religion are used as excuses for the bloodshed and suffering which are, in reality, caused almost exclusively by the greed for power and wealth which is the fundamental cause of the world's conflicts. James Quinn, Lanark. Would doubling council tax on holiday homes solve affordable housing problems? (Image: Getty) Concrete evidence Douglas Jardine (Letters, April 22) mentions the M6 Preston bypass being the first stretch of motorway in Britain. As a teenager in the late 1960s travelling with my parents down to family in Cheshire, my dad used to tell me that very same fact. Usually because I had asked him why the car had all of a sudden become very noisy. He would tell me how the Preston bypass had a concrete surface, compared to the newer M6 sections, and the rougher concrete surface caused vibration on the car. Now don't get me started with the traffic jams down the old A6 at Shap summit and virtually every town en route. Brian Watt, Edinburgh. Say, where is Scotland? On reading Willie Towers' letter (April 23) I was reminded of a conversation I had in a lift in Niagara Falls years ago when an American hearing my Scottish accent asked me if we had the internet and was Scotland in London? Richard Beattie, Glaston. The incredible sulk Every time I see a photo of Donald Trump, wearing his normal expression, I am reminded of my childhood, when a scolding would end with the admonition 'and you can just get rid of that petted lip!' Is that a sign of my age, or his? P Davidson, Falkirk.
