For people who understand the importance of the hundreds of jobs at Ferguson Marine and are passionate about harnessing Scotland’s shipbuilding heritage for future prosperity, the Port Glasgow yard’s defeat in the battle to build seven small ferries for CalMac is undoubtedly a bitter blow.

The jobs are, of course, vital for the individuals who hold them and their families. Furthermore, we overlook at our peril the value of this employment to an Inverclyde economy which does not have its challenges to seek.

And that makes the politicking over the yard, which currently employs 305 people and has been owned by the Scottish Government since being nationalised in 2019, all the more dispiriting.

The politics ratcheted up a notch again today after the Scottish Government’s Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL) announced that it intends to award the contract for the seven fully electric vessels to Poland’s Remontowa Shipbuilding.

Conservative MSP Sue Webber declared: "This announcement is devastating for Ferguson Marine and could yet prove the death knell for the yard.”

She added: “It should be a given that a nationalised shipyard wins a Scottish Government contract. Yet it’s a measure of how badly the SNP have mismanaged Ferguson’s that ferries which should be built on the west coast of Scotland are instead to be made in Eastern Europe.”

This sort of finger-pointing might be politically appealing but it is disheartening because there are hundreds of valuable jobs at stake here. And, while........

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