Let’s clear up one point. It was well within the powers of Scottish Government ministers to ensure the Ferguson yard secured the Small Vessels Replacement Programme order in whole or part, instead of spectating while its procurement quango sent £175 million to Gdansk.

Whether it should have done so is another question and we would need a lot more information about the management and capabilities of the Port Glasgow yard in order to form a judgment. That is information which the Scottish Government has absolutely no desire to share with us.

Neither, however, should they pretend that the outcome has nothing to do with them. For confirmation we need only go back to the origins of this saga when Ministers ignored technical expertise and the pleadings of its own quango in order to direct an order to the yard that it was incapable of fulfilling.

The irony now is that the Ferguson yard has lost a contract of the kind it delivered successfully for decades past, before all this began. The idea that the Ferguson yard was “saved” by the notorious contract and the political grandstanding which accompanied it was always a fallacy. Let’s now hope there is enough of its previous reputation left to salvage.

Read more

These things are in the past and in the past they must remain. We are about to find out if any lessons have been learned. Or will the deeply arrogant institutions which have visited a decade of chaos upon island communities continue to rule the roost, from the safe distances of Edinburgh and Port Glasgow.

In this context, I exempt CalMac, who are more........

© Herald Scotland