Mibbes Aye is our podcast series for people who would like some more information to help make up their minds on independence. The April edition was all about Scotland’s ports. Who owns them? Are they fit for purpose? What strategies will we need to develop an independent Scotland’s port infrastructure? What about setting up new ferry routes over to Northern Europe?
Have a guess: who owns our port infrastructure?
If you were asked who owns our ports you might think Scottish Government? the Local Authority? The Queen? All of those suggestions would probably be better than the correct answer which is : Hedge Fund Investors. And the one thing you can be fairly certain about is that they are not running them with the best interested of Scotland in mind.
How did this sorry state of affairs come about? And if the current situation is just not working for Scotland, how can we remedy it? All this you’ll find out in this excellent talk by Alf Baird and his discussion with Glasgow Pensioners for Indy.
In the two weeks since we broadcast this edition of Mibbes Aye, it has been watched nearly 700 times. We think this reflects the subject of the discussion. Most of us just have no clue about who owns important infrastructure like this. And it’s a shock when we find out.
Watch here:
If you’re on the go, you can listen to the audio version on Spotify, Google, Podbean Apple, Amazon….. Anywhere you listen to your podcasts, you’ll be able to listen to our Scottish Independence Podcasts! Here’s the Podbean link:
Prior to his retirement, Alf was Professor of Maritime Business and Director of the Maritime Research Group at Edinburgh Napier University. He has a PhD in Strategic Management in Global Shipping.
His specialist area of research and teaching is strategic management in maritime transport. His research activities encompass most of the world’s main shipping markets in Europe, Asia, Mid-East and North and Latin America and Australasia.
[…] miss this episode and prepare to be enraged. You can also read more about this topic in our blogpost on the […]
Will a new ports’ structure be needed? If so wil it be possible to get control of them from the Hedge Fund Investors? Will the costs of re-structuring them be so high as to make the venture non viable? Is it possible to revive Rosyth and once again have both freight and passenger travel. I was told this was imminent but I see no sign of this.