The People

If Scotland can't run a ferry, how could it run a country?

Q: If Scotland can't run a ferry, how could it run a country?

The ferries fiasco is real, devolved, and owned in full on this page - no excuses offered. But the jibe proves the opposite of what it thinks: a government's failure is an argument for sacking a government, which Scots can do. It says nothing about statehood - as the Faroe Islands, population 54,000, keep demonstrating with undersea tunnels.

The short answer

Here is the attack line at full strength: the Scottish Government ordered two ferries for £97 million, and they will have cost around £460 million by the time both are sailing - the second one eight years late. Meanwhile island communities have watched an ageing CalMac fleet break down under them. If Scotland can't run a ferry, the line goes, how could it run a country?

This page will not defend any of that, because it is indefensible and the site's rule is honesty. What this page will do is ask what the fiasco actually proves. The answer: that a government failed at a procurement - something governments of every stripe, in every country, occasionally and expensively do. The remedy for a failed government is an election. The jibe wants the failure to prove something else entirely - that a nation is incapable - and that second claim doesn't survive one look across the water at what smaller, poorer island nations build as a matter of routine.

The fiasco, owned in full

The record, plainly. In 2015, two dual-fuel ferries were ordered from Ferguson Marine for £97 million, due in 2018. The contract went wrong in almost every available way: design changes after work began, a breakdown in relations between the yard and the government's procurement body CMAL, the yard's collapse into nationalisation in 2019, and costs that have more than quadrupled to around £460 million (Audit Scotland; The Scotsman). Glen Sannox finally entered service in 2025. Glen Rosa, after corrosion was found at her first dry-docking, is now expected in late 2026 - eight years behind schedule (The Business Desk).

Behind the two famous hulls sits the wider problem: more than a third of CalMac's vessels are operating beyond their design life, with breakdowns and cancellations landing on the island communities least able to absorb them (The Scotsman). The fleet-renewal neglect that produced that backlog accumulated over decades, under administrations of every party in Edinburgh and, before devolution, London. Islanders are entitled to be furious. Nothing on this page suggests otherwise.

What island nations actually build

Now look at what places smaller than Scotland do about island connectivity.

The Faroe Islands have 54,000 people - fewer than Dunfermline and its surrounds - on eighteen islands in the North Atlantic. They have built some twenty road tunnels, four of them under the sea. The Eysturoy tunnel, opened in 2020, runs 11.2 kilometres beneath a fjord and contains the world's first undersea roundabout; it cost roughly a billion Danish kroner - about £115 million - and its tolls are helping fund the next tunnel, which duly opened to Sandoy in 2023 (Visit Faroe Islands; Maritime Executive). A community the size of a Scottish council ward decided its islands would be connected, engineered it, and is paying for it on a toll-and-reinvest model.

Norway, with 5.5 million people and a coastline shredded into fjords and islands, runs ferries and bores tunnels as ordinary national infrastructure - not as periodic crises. Iceland, with 400,000 people, maintains its island and highland connections through winters that make the Minch look like a boating pond. Nobody asks whether these countries are capable of statehood because a vessel is late. The question would be recognised as silly.

So the comparison the jibe invites turns out to be the most dangerous one for it. "Too incompetent to run a ferry" is being offered as evidence against independence by the only northern European maritime nation without control of its own full toolkit - while the small independent neighbours, several with fewer resources, quietly build tunnels.

The lever Holyrood doesn't hold

None of that excuses the procurement failure - with the powers Holyrood has, the ferries should have been delivered. But when the argument moves from "that government failed" to "Scotland couldn't do better", it runs into a structural fact worth knowing.

Island infrastructure of the Faroese kind needs patient capital: big sums, borrowed against decades of use. The self-governing Faroes borrow and toll for their tunnels as they see fit. Holyrood cannot. Under the Westminster-set fiscal framework, the Scottish Government's capital borrowing is capped at £450 million a year and £3 billion in total, index-linked (gov.scot fiscal framework factsheet; Scottish Fiscal Commission). That is the envelope for every school, hospital, road and harbour in the country - combined. Roughly four Faroese undersea tunnels' worth, per year, for all of it.

Be careful what this does and doesn't prove. It doesn't excuse Ferguson Marine: the ferries fit inside the existing envelope and were bungled anyway. What it shows is the ceiling on the fix. A Scotland that wanted to do what the Faroes did - a generational programme of tunnels, causeways and new tonnage, financed against the future - couldn't, however competent its government, because the borrowing powers of a normal country are precisely what devolution withholds. Competence failures are Scotland's to correct at the ballot box. The investment ceiling isn't on any Scottish ballot at all.

So what's the real question?

Not whether the ferries fiasco happened - it did, it was a devolved failure, and the people responsible answer to Scottish voters, which is exactly as it should be.

The real question is what it proves, and the honest answer is: nothing about statehood. Every country's history includes a procurement disaster; the difference between a bad government and an incapable nation is the whole point of democracy - you fire the one, and you remain the other. Scots can already sack the government that botched the ferries. What they cannot currently do is equip any Scottish government, good or bad, with the tools every neighbouring maritime nation uses to connect its islands. The Faroe Islands are not better than Scotland at being Scotland. They are simply allowed to try.

Take it with you

Facts for sharing - each button copies the line, with its source and a link back to this page.

Two ferries ordered for £97m will have cost around £460m by delivery - the second one eight years late. This page doesn't defend that; it asks what it actually proves (Audit Scotland; The Scotsman)
The Faroe Islands - 54,000 people - have built some twenty road tunnels including four under the sea, one with the world's first undersea roundabout. Tolls from each tunnel help fund the next (Visit Faroe Islands; Maritime Executive)
More than a third of CalMac's ships are operating beyond their design life - the fleet renewal decades that produced that backlog spanned governments of every party, in Edinburgh and London (The Scotsman)
Holyrood's entire annual capital borrowing is capped at £450m by the Westminster-set fiscal framework - about four Faroese undersea tunnels' worth for all of Scotland's infrastructure needs combined (gov.scot fiscal framework factsheet)