IT is not so long ago that the Scottish Government’s chief economic adviser (now former adviser) complained how most of its strategies consisted of pious wish-lists. The fault is yet to be cured, if we can judge by the current controversies over ferries for CalMac.

These boats are expensive but necessary to maintain the communities on our far-flung islands, with their unique cultural and linguistic contribution to national life. Even a wicked supporter of capitalism like me can agree with this argument.

All I ask is that the apparatus of support should be transparent, that we should know how much is being spent and what for. Without expecting super returns on such benign investments, I think we should at least be confident that, for the particular purposes in mind, there are no better ways of spending the money. Any reasonable democrat would surely say the same.

Let us apply the principle to the real case of CalMac. Getting ready for the slipway of Ferguson’s shipyard at Port Glasgow are two big new ferries, each with a carrying capacity of 130 cars. They were originally projected to cost £97 million, but the final figure looks to be about double that. While other shipbuilders are being invited to take over the contract, they don’t seem likely to. With the costs running at such a horrendous level, nationalisation appears to be about the only way of carrying these orders through to completion.

But then let us make a comparison with Pentland Ferries, a private company right at the top of Scotland operated by the local Banks family. It offers an entirely unsubsidised run from Gills Bay in Caithness to St Margaret Hope in Orkney. The company has been waiting all year to bring into service a snazzy new catamaran, carrying 100 cars and generating half the carbon dioxide emissions of the supposedly green CalMac. For Pentland Ferries the problem is not money: the catamaran costs a mere £14m. All that is required is the necessary approvals from the Scottish Government and from the EU, both meanwhile piling up regulation on regulation and subsidy on subsidy to the rival Scrabster-Stromness route. This dispute seems doomed to stagger on into 2020, for no obvious reason except bureaucratic inertia.

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Bureaucratic inertia is inseparable from the public sector. That is the basic reason for the eye-watering cost to the public purse of the bloated and state-funded CalMac. The charge for the superior service of Pentland Ferries is nil.

We should obviously never have allowed ourselves to get into this mess in the first place, but here I don’t want to intrude on the bitter wrangling between the Scottish Government and Jim McColl, billionaire owner of Ferguson.

Relations seem to have broken down between the two sides, even though McColl voted Yes to independence in 2014, also joined the First Minister’s council of economic advisers, showed willing to act as company doctor on her behalf and be a general good egg in the new Scotland, when so many of his fellow businessmen are rotten eggs.

Now he accuses her of “abuse of power”: no more cocktail parties at Bute House for him.

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The thing that does intrigue me is what more all this tells us about the Scottish Government’s “hostility to capitalism”, as I called it in another recent column. This may have been a provocative formulation, and it aroused protests from readers.

But it increasingly appears to me that I had just picked up some early signals already being sent out by official policy decisions. One example was the burdensome conditions heaped on a company like Marine Biopolymers of Ayr, and so spitefully that they decided to develop their business in distant but friendly Iceland rather than at home in negative and niggling Scotland.

The directors might have been SNP voters but they were also capitalists: to hell with them, then. In this way, an industry of the future is casually lost to us on some bizarre ideological excuse.

I know that Cabinet Secretary Derek Mackay has said this about Ferguson: “It is absolutely essential that the outstanding contracts to build these two ferries are completed in order to sustain the Clyde and Hebrides Ferry Services network and provide vital support for the economies of our island communities.”

But nationalisation is not just for Christmas. After Christmas, we will be left with a shipyard in public ownership and no clear idea what to do with it. Public ownership is nothing new on Clydeside – all the yards got nationalised in the 1970s, which was not enough to save most of them. Apart from Ferguson, BAE Systems survive upriver at Scotstoun and Govan, but only on UK naval contracts, which also means they can be used as blackmail against workers who might otherwise vote SNP. In any case, by far the biggest shipbuilding countries in the world are now South Korea, Japan and China, where success comes through working practices which I doubt would ever be tolerated by our lads along the Clyde.

All the same, rumours abound that the Scottish Government prefers to nationalise Ferguson because it is at heart a socialist Government, and in the end it would like to bring the whole transport sector under public ownership. CalMac has been there since 1990.

Recently it was joined by Prestwick Airport, where losses to date have been limited to a mere £40m. The Government has taken a stake in BiFab, a former shipbuilder now supplying the oil industry, but only last week got a slap on the wrist when Audit Scotland reduced the value of its stake from £13m to £6m. Let us hope the government might do better if it also takes over the appalling Scotrail, but the signs are not good.

Problems with nationalisation are never easy to overcome. First, who is going to run the company? Jim McColl is the richest man in Scotland, worth £800m and with a proven record of rescues and start-ups. If he cannot make a success of reviving shipbuilding on the Clyde, then who on earth can?

Some other businessman on less cosy terms with the First Minister? Some senior civil servant? You must be joking.

An even bigger question is whether the nationalised companies will be expected to make profits, or whether they will need to get by somehow on endless losses, as during the last era of nationalisation in 1945-79.

It then becomes difficult for them to invest, because investment requires funds, or to give pay rises, because wages require revenue. Yet the First Minister told us just a couple of weeks ago that she did not care about profits, which are a component of Gross Domestic Product, but only about “wellness”.

You cannot put numbers on that, so ignorance will be bliss, at least to her. I doubt if it will be to us. There is a great deal more to the fate of Ferguson than first meets the eye.