Commenting on news that CalMac is drafting in a 23-year-old ferry to temporarily replace the 36-year-old MV Hebridean Isles which has broken down, Highlands and Islands MSP Donald Cameron, said:
“Given that the operational life-span of a ferry is supposed to be 25 years it speaks volumes about the SNP’s management of our ferry fleet that they are having to replace a 36-year-old vessel with one that is itself ready for retirement."
“Every breakdown, every cancellation, every delay in replacement ferries coming into service, serves as a reminder of how the SNP have let down our island communities.”
HCUA Comment:
This latest SNP disaster for Scotland demonstrates just how pervasive its culture of incompetence and failure has become.
Providing a safe and reliable ferry service for the islands is a basic and fundamentally very simple thing to do: make sure that you have enough ferries of the right size and capability, and make sure that you keep the ferry replacement programme going. But under SNP mismanagement Scotland is apparently incapable of building and delivering new ferries, so the service crumbles at an accelerating rate.
Our island communities are in effect being abandoned by the SNP, left to deal with a third-rate service that would shame a third-world country. And make no mistake: this disaster for our islands has come about purely and simply because of SNP failures: failed policies, failed ministers, failed contracts and complete failure to listen to those who actually know what is needed. Nothing is going to change whilst arrogant, incompetent SNP apparatchiks are in government and remain obsessed with only one thing: the Nationalist's destructive separatism that serves no one except failed SNP politicians.