ScottishNews.com

The US Department of Energy reckons such vessels cost around three times as much to build and run. Americans pay that premium knowingly, because a country that cannot build its own ships does not truly control its own coastline.

So, a question for Holyrood: would Donald Trump let America’s ferries be built in China?

This is the President who signed an order titled Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance, and whose officials drew up fees on Chinese-built ships merely for calling at US ports. Those fees are now suspended amid his trade dealings with Beijing, but the direction in Washington is unmistakable, and bipartisan.

Scotland is doing the opposite.

Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa, ordered from Ferguson Marine for 2018, became a national punchline. Ministers concluded that Scotland can’t build ships, so buy abroad. It was the wrong lesson.

Turkey was meant to be the grown-up alternative. Isle of Islay was due in October 2024 and handed over in January 2026, around fifteen months late. By June, CMAL had taken ownership of three unfinished sister ships still in Turkey to protect public money. Meanwhile seven small electric ferries, work Ferguson did for decades, went to Poland, and two Northern Isles freight ferries are being built in China.

The Walrus will say it plainly: a Port Glasgow ferry may cost more. So be it. Scotland’s economy should come first.

Send £100 million to Turkey and Scotland gets a ferry and nothing else. Spend it on the Clyde, even a good deal more, and Scotland gets the ferry plus the wages in Inverclyde, the tax flowing back to the public purse and the benefits nobody needs to claim.

Then follow the steel. A ship is assembled by hundreds of firms: fabricators, electricians, pipefitters, scaffolders, joiners, hauliers and machine shops across the west of Scotland. All of them employ people and train apprentices.

At the very end of that chain is the greasy spoon van parked outside the dock gates at half six every morning. Bacon rolls and strong tea before the shift. Its owner buys her rolls from the local baker, her bacon from the local butcher and her diesel from the garage down the road. Close the yard and the van goes, and the baker, the butcher and the high street all feel it. No tender evaluation counts that.

Economists call it the multiplier. Inverclyde calls it a future. A Scottish bid and a Turkish bid are not like for like: one is the whole cost to Scotland; the other is the half that leaves the country.

When Ferguson advertised fifteen apprenticeships, around five hundred people applied. This summer it announced up to seventy job losses because it had nothing to build. And when a lifeline ferry built in Yalova or Guangzhou goes wrong, the people who know it best are a continent away. In China’s case, they sit in a country the UK government has called an epoch-defining challenge.

None of this excuses Ferguson’s past. That was a failure of governance: a contract approved without proper safeguards and a design that kept shifting. But the workers didn’t sign that contract. Ministers did. Punishing the yard is like sacking the crew because the captain ran the ship aground.

What’s needed is a funded twenty-year build programme, standard designs built in series, tenders scored on their whole value to Scotland, and Ferguson run by real shipbuilders. Instead, months after promising the yard four new vessels, ministers had not even sought the advice needed to award them.

If a vessel will carry our children, patients and groceries across the Minch for thirty years, it should be built by people who will one day sail on it, and who bought their breakfast from the van at the dock gate.

Build the ships here.