This first appeared in the June edition of Scots Independent

Professor John Robertson OBA

I’ve written on ferry services, globally, more times than I can remember in vain attempt to get the Herald and other media to stop publishing downright lies about CalMac which inevitably must be seeping into the public consciousness and, I feel sure, damaging the confidence of travellers from all over the UK and beyond with negative economic consequences for the islands.

I’ve tried to put CalMac’s relatively minor problems into a global context, revealing the very real crises in affluent societies from British Columbia, through Washington State, to the Channel Islands and the Isle of wight, to Greece and on to New Zealand. I’ve disclosed a litany of private sector corruption, rusting unreliable often very old vessels, flooding decks and running aground, prices many times higher than faced in Scotland, smaller islands getting no service at all, governments delaying newbuilds well beyond anything faced here, rocketing new build prices higher than the Glen Sannox or Glen Rosa and even violence by crew and customers. In response, some have just said – ‘I don’t live in wherever. I live in Uist and I had to wait so long for a ferry, I’m thinking of leaving and returning to….Somerset!’ I have yet to read of a single returnee.

As I wrote the many reports on the above all-too-real fiascos, I kept thinking, why has no one actually asked a representative sample of ferry users what they think? You have to wonder if CalMac is so awful, why then has no media outlet done so? My suspicious mind feels sure – they don’t want to find out that actually the great majority of users are actually satisfied or better and that all of their coverage is a politicised, highly selective sampling, to be employed in a proxy media war against the Scottish Government, the SNP and the whole independence movement.

So, I did a quick ‘twitterpoll’ myself and found more than 90% of tourists and islanders felt well or very well served by CalMac. It was a sample of less than 200 respondents and self-selecting so not very reliable, but I was still surprised with the lack of negativity in a poll that could be seen by many thousands and given the apparent hostility in the media.

Then, to my surprise and no little embarrassment, I discovered that CalMac actually commissions professional satisfaction surveys for each of the areas they serve, with samples in the thousands, in the public domain and subject to full disclosure. Again, suspiciously, no journalist seems ever to have questioned these surveys – they just ignore them! That of course is why I didn’t know of them.

What do they reveal? Amongst other things, we see satisfaction levels well-above 80% across all areas including the supposedly distressed communities in Arran, Islay, Mull and South Uist. No other public service in Scotland or elsewhere across the UK has such levels of satisfaction. The privately owned ferry services in the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands dare not ask their customers what they think.

It’s clear, the vast majority of CalMac’s customers know what they’re getting, remember what they had before, and really appreciate it. A few politically motivated and entitled individuals want even more service despite the fact that the same surveys reveal large expensive ferries half empty most of the year and massively subsidised by the rest of us who do not benefit from their island idyll.