Readers' Letters: Late ferries show nationalisation not answer

It is easy to tell that Leah Gunn Barrett (Letters, 28 April) has no experience of the nationalised sector under which we suffered for many decades until the 1980s and 1990s.

Far from standards sinking under the private sector, they rose for one simple reason: if they were poor, people wouldn't use them and businesses wouldn't make money. To the public sector, there is no profit motive, so no need to bother with what Joe Public thinks and those of us over 50 know and remember that.It was the state capitalist approach which her attitude typifies which dragged the UK down to being “the sick man of Europe” in the 1970s, when our state-owned industries were being undermined by extreme left-wing trades union leaders.

The power blackouts of the Seventies; the NHS strikes; coal industry strikes; dismal, barely functioning British Rail; rubbish piled high in the streets and unburied bodies are what she seems to think is what we both want and need. To anyone who lived through those times, this is astonishing. As a case in point, now, we have a nationalised shipbuilding yard on the Clyde with ferries which are years late, rusting and likely to cost £450 million plus. The SNP do not seem to have any paperwork to show who approved it. It has been “lost”. I cannot think of a better exemplar of what happens with state ownership and what a disaster an independent Scotland would be.

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

The unfinished Glen Sannox Caledonian Macbrayne ferry is seen in the Ferguson Marine shipyard (Picture: Peter Summers/Getty Images)

Be civilised