From BBC Scotland today:
Transport Secretary Stephen Flynn told a Holyrood committee he knew nothing about a gas leak on board a CalMac ferry, despite records showing he had been emailed about the incident. A faulty valve led to 700kg of methane gas being vented from the side of MV Glen Sannox while it was carrying passengers from Arran to Troon in June 2025.
Flynn claimed he missed a BBC Scotland report on the incident as he was facetiming his children before he appeared in front of the transport committee last month. But a briefing document released via a freedom of information (FOI) request showed Flynn was contacted about the story twice in the hours between publication and his committee appearance.
Transport Scotland said the document “made clear” Flynn had “not been briefed on the issue” before his committee appearance. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5yn75jr75ro
I feel sure no government minister sits looking at his emails coming in. His staff do that and alert him to anything important or urgent. Nothing above says he read the emails.
Anyhow it matters not.
Why?
This fuss, above, would, in other, normal, countries, be an astonishing hysterical amplification of a very low risk event.
I’ll deal with the: While the risk of explosion is believed to have been low, CalMac described it as a “critical failure” comment first.
Methane will explode only in the 5% to 15% but alarms will go off at 1% methane (20% gas vapour concentration) and 2% (40%) will lead to shutdown, nowhere near the explosive range. https://www.classnk.or.jp/hp/pdf/rules/amendments/e-Amendments/16.12.27/411_part_gf_e.pdf
Was there a shutdown automatically triggered by 40% LEL 2% methane cloud? No, engineers shutdown manually. so the risk of explosion was essentially zero.
Returning to the incident overall, this is closer to a layered safety system catching a component failure than to an uncontrolled disaster. A valve failed open and dumped a large volume of methane overboard. Gas was drawn into ventilation spaces and set off further alarms, and the crew isolated the leak by hand. Methane is lighter than air, so most of it dispersed rather than accumulating to explosive concentrations. An expert quoted in the piece said the detectors and automatic fuel shut-off appear to have done their job. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1mv50enz09o
A valve can fail open and still not produce a catastrophe if later safety layers work, as they did.
Finally 82 passengers on 3 June 2025? 82? Summer? The MV Glen Sannox can take 852, more than 10 times as many! There’d be plenty room on the lifeboats.
Sheesh! That’s a monstrous subsidy provided by the Scottish taxpayer, via that SNP Government, that some islanders never stop moaning about.
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#SNPBAD , so yet another one to add as part of the ongoing BBC election campaign for next year’s Scottish council elections , all being done to try to help other parties win seats against the SNP.
Liz S
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You wrote “Gaslighting the people over a managed and insignificant gas leak on an almost empty ferry – Whether or not Stephen Flynn saw the emails does not matter”
Well just as the media try to gaslight the people in Scotland about the SNP, they are doing the same in England , in them also trying to gaslight people there about the Green party leader, Zach Polanski, and his party , the Greens.
The Greens came second yesterday in a safe Labour seat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election (Keir Starmer’s old seat).
Baroness Jones , Green party Peer, was interviewed on SKY News and she said:
“To come second in a safe Labour seat, thats been Labour for 43 years since it was set up, is not embarrassing, its not shameful, I think its absolutely incredible..”
This was after she was asked by the presenter “Do you see this (result) as a setback for Zach Polanski” ?
Also Saul Staniforth’s X account showed these below stats for the previous election results in this seat , Holborn & St Pancras, against yesterday’s result:
2017 Labour 70.1% – Greens – 3.4%
2019 Labour 64.5% – Greens 4.8%
2024 Labour 48.9% – Greens 10.4%
2026 Labour 45.2% – Greens 32.8%
Yet today we have the (politically compromised) UK media asking if Zach Polanski should resign as Green party leader.
A political commentator had noted that Polanski, in 2025, had said that he was “very tempted to stand against Keir Starmer in this seat” .
Then Starmer resigned as an MP , the political commentator noted that if Polanski had decided “to not stand as a Green party candidate in this by-election yesterday”, then no doubt “he would have been accused of bottling it” , i.e. by the very same media who are now asking today if he should consider resigning, when he has actually increased the vote for his party in this by-election !
No question about it being a case of the UK media having an agenda when it comes to who they want to win in Scotland (which is anyone but the SNP or the Scottish Greens) and in England it is mostly the right wing parties that they, as a media , support and so hope will win elections.
They will also , as a UK media, give some fleeting support and credit to any new Labour party that is more to the right than in the centre and also who are very much less on the left .
That’s the UK media as part of the UK establishment, that tries to clumsily manipulate public opinion in favour of who they , as a media, support and also on who they, as a media, are against.
Polanski, just like SNP politicians, is being treated with the same contempt, hate and bullying that the SNP are often subjected to by a dishonest UK media, who as a UK media, are far less interested in striving to report the actual real factual political news and far far more interested in pumping out political propaganda , that serves both their own interests (and also those that they support) more than the interests of the ordinary people who live within the UK State.
Simples.
Liz S
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