More evidence of secret dealings and irregular conduct has emerged in Scotland’s celebrated ‘ferry fiasco’, to add to the details I described last month in the LRB. A BBC Scotland documentary, ‘The Great Ferries Scandal’, broadcast on 27 September, revealed a remarkable level of co-operation between the Scottish government and the shipbuilder, Ferguson’s, to make sure that the Port Glasgow company won the contract against competition from shipyards in Germany, Poland and England. On the evidence of hundreds of documents leaked to the BBC, the principles of transparency and fair-dealing embodied in the procurement law of Scotland and England – and of the European Union, to which in 2015 the United Kingdom still belonged – look almost certain to have been broken.
