Lesley Riddoch in her early April 2026 podcast said on the ferries crisis (literally)

I’ve got to say personally, I’m sick of hearing people on the mainland ‘attack islanders’ for simply expecting that they can be connected. Just to remind you we all live on an island, and it would be a bit like saying Scotland’s a bit too expensive to include in UK national systems so let’s just charge them more. We wouldnae, would we?’

Who are those ‘people’ attacking islanders then? Turns out it’s me!

‘I’m probably gonna lose some friends on this because I am absolutely sick of people blaming the islanders for sort of whinging or for getting more than their just deserts….but the other that’s just driving me crazy is the amount of misrepresentation there is going around and I’ve got to say the otherwise estimable Professor John Robertson who does Talking-up Scotland has got a post, I mean, this is so hurtful to people, on the islands. Many people on the islands have got in touch with me about this. He is very critical of islanders.’

She goes on to reject my comparison between Calmac and five other ferry providers in the UK and North America in favour of comparing with Norway which has a more decentralised privatised system.

So, the next day, I get three threats of physical violence should I ever visit certain islands, in social media, all quickly moderated and removed. Historically, these last three years I’ve had more grief for writing in defence of CalMac against the media ferry fiasco feeding frenzy narrative which is clearly a political movement by a few elite ‘islanders’ and local politicians against the SNP.

I have studied hundreds of reports, from the Isle of Wight to British Columbia and on to Greece and New Zealand. By any measure, cost, reliability, safety and inclusiveness, CalMac wins hands down. Give me a break on this? 40 years teaching research methods and doing research published in peer-review.

I hadn’t looked at Norway because I thought, obviously, with £2 trillion in the bank, compared to Scotland chained to a huge neighbour that had not fed or heated itself for centuries and whose $3 trillion debt we must share, they’d beat us easily. It turns out their system, like every other ferry system in the developed world, is proving at least inconvenient for a few of those living on islands.

Back to ‘islanders’, I am not attacking them. Why would I? I have no idea what they think. The only voices we ever hear on the ferries are local business people, many of whom are recent arrivals, perhaps unprepared for the inevitable challenges they will face on an island on the edge of the stormiest seas in the world. Around 100 000 of Scotland’s 5.5 million population live on islands. We have no idea what they think of CalMac. No one has ever asked them or even a representative sample of them. CalMac does satisfaction surveys which commonly return 80-90% approval, way above any other public service. No journalist, doubting their reliability has ever done a freedom of information request to enable scrutiny and exposure. Equally, no professionally executed survey has revealed any exodus due to the ferries. Finally, opinion polls asking the electorate what issues might affect their vote, find even the wider topic of transport attracting fewer than 1% concerned about it.

Life on the islands in Scotland, especially in the SNP era, is marked by massive reductions in travel costs due to the Road Equivalent Tariff and the direct subsidy to CalMac enabling it to keep prices the lowest in the developed world.

I have complained to Lesley Riddoch, at length. After several days she responded to my two-page attempt to explain with just one line suggesting she was just reporting what I had said. She had not and did not respond to my key points.

In the light of the then current media feeding frenzy on CalMac and CMAL, still frenzied today, and my immediate empathy for the crews, victims of another proxy war against the Scottish Government, the SNP and the Yes movement. This is similar to those we see on health, education and other public services, despite them all demonstrably performing better than elsewhere. I was thus motivated to do just what the man from Mull suggested.

As hopefully you do, I recognise in the ‘ferry fiasco’ narrative a classic moral panic based on media amplification leading to an irrational but popular belief in a largely socially constructed world, just as we have seen with youth subcultures from mods through hippies and punks to hip hop, all apparently foreboding the end of civilisation. The ‘ferry fiasco’, is no different from the ‘housing crisis’, the ‘SNP soft touch on crime’, the ‘QEUH scandal’, the Covid hospital discharge deaths’, ‘Trans murderers’ or ‘SNP corruption’ panics. Rare, misunderstood, phenomena are amplified by hacks to make money regardless of the tragic costs for individuals caught up in the feeding frenzy.

Judging by the hostile tone and simple realist argument, driven by, it seems, an unrepresentative few contacts, I might as well resign myself and give Arran and Cumbrae a miss this year.