Hameesh al-Qobson’s diary: the view from across the Maghreb
23 March 2023
SITTING AT MIDNIGHT in a café on the Grand Socco just outside the walls of the Medina in Tangier, I feel pretty confident in my cover story. I am disguised as Hameesh al-Qobson, international businessman, but in reality I am working for “N”, the mysterious, reclusive, novel-reading head of the Scottish Secret Service. He she it or they operate(s) from Isla Bryson House, a discrete, pink-washed building in fashionable Sturgeon Square in Edinburgh. The only sign on the board behind the concierge’s desk says Universal Import.
My job is to “import” secrets from more developed countries than Scotland for Party preservation purposes. I am part of a larger team. Others in the service work out of departments with self-explanatory titles like Barnett Transfers (foreign government subvention acquisition strategies), Environment Destruction Exploitation (windfarm developments in scenic areas, etc.) and Domestic Industry Suppression (malt whisky deproduction, tourism repellence, road dismaintenance, public nontransportation, etc.). My own field is Ferry Construction.
I travel round the world at public expense trying to find out how to replicate the successes once achieved with companies like John Browns, Fairfields, Scott Lithgow and John G. Kincaid, the marine engine builders in Greenock. Despite having been founded as long ago as 1868, the latter was successfully repurposed as a defunct accounting entity within a single year by a sinister agent of progress in London who called himself “Tony Benn” (not his original name, I am sure).
This Benn employed a simple technique known as the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act (1977). Armed only with that, a pipe and a limitless thirst for builders’ tea and tabloid headlines, he was able to transition each of those historic firms, and many others like them inside and outside Scotland, from being planet-destroying, ocean-going structure constructors to climate-neutral, eco-friendly museum index entries by sending the workforce shopping at Argyle Street and rewilding their fabrication shops, design lofts and slipways.
Where all was once action and noise, with steel cutting machines and ugly scaffolding everywhere, there is now peace and quiet – and long grass, dandelions and nationally important sub-species of nettle proliferating. Vibrant, self-governing communities of rats have established themselves outside the ruined tea huts, helped by discrete subsidies from a generous public in the form of discarded fish suppers and the remains of chicken tikka masalas to go. Old Irn Bru cans give shelter to the cockroaches and venomous slugs which occupy important niches in the post-industrial food chain.
For all the progress made in the late 1970s, however, Scotland has a lingering problem in places like Port Glasgow, which is still in thrall to big steel, heavy metal and the heroes of our rivet-hammering past. We need to replace all that with power-point presentations heralding progressive agendas for shipbuilding, or the need for tripartite toilet facilities in all workplaces.
My job on this assignment is to sit in the smoke-filled cafés of Tangier trying to make unofficial contact with Moroccan experts who might be able to show me the path to the future in much the same way as Tony Benn found inspiration inside the trade union conference halls of Brighton, Blackpool and Scarborough. As a by-product, I hope to be able to explain why £87,000 bonuses were paid to shipyard management executives for success in what primitive Scots of the last century might have called “failure”.
The crowds around me mill and froth like coffee in a giant percolator. I notice a young man sitting not far away who orders a glass of mint tea with eight spoonfuls of sugar. That could be a sign. He is wearing a tartan tie in a blueish pattern, and sports a beard trimmed to make him look like an under-warlord from the Hindu Kush who might have stolen a pair of blunt scissors. We make eye contact, and he introduces himself as “Yousaf”.
I respond with an ingratiating smile and say: “Call me Humza”. As a professional agent, I naturally do not want to give away the crown jewels of my real identity too early in our relationship.
I quickly understand that Yousaf is for real because he starts discussing his powerful Chinese motorcycle, parked nearby in the Rue d’Ecosse. I ask if he has insurance for it, and he laughs in a way which suggests flashing scimitars, dirty jellabas and the crack of a hundred concealed Lee-Metfords whose bullets ricochet off the rocks above the pass.
It turns out to be a long night, but in the end I manage to penetrate young Yousaf and get the full story about twenty-first century shipyard management as practiced in newly developed countries. Back home in the medina at dawn, as the muezzin calls prayers from the tower on the mosque below the Kasbah, and the cocks crow on the roofs of the houses all around, I rough out a report to “N”, which I’ll encode later and send to Bryson House by Qooglemail.
The principle behind the Yousaf approach is that creative news generation should be “front and centre” in any successful strategy for industrial transcendence. The “voting” public must be convinced that production is under way while the government is in fact working to ensure that no completed ships actually emerge to pollute the planet by moving people around in locally fabricated steel structures.
As is well known, the Glen Sannox and Hull 802 were laid down at Ferguson’s yard in Port Glasgow in April 2016, a year after the contract was signed by a dapper front-man called Texter Mackay. He told the Party faithful at the time, “We are bringing commercial shipbuilding back to the lower Clyde”. Little did the smiling, upturned faces know what the future was to hold.
The Glen Sannox was launched unfinished in November 2017. Adapting Tony Benn’s twentieth century strategy to twenty-first century conditions, the Party nationalised the yard in 2019. That enabled the project to be extended almost indefinitely.
The secret, Yousaf explained to me, with dawn’s left hand already in the sky and the café crowd beginning to thin out, is never to hammer in the last rivet. Though that may sound obvious with hindsight, it was a revolutionary idea at the time. Thus, after being launched, the Glen Sannox was taken straight back into dry dock in order to have the underwater part of the bow replaced.
This was an important job since, as Yousaf explained even before I had offered any bonuses or other off-balance sheet emoluments, even the general public knows that all parts of the submerged section of a ship have to be water-tight if the vessel is to sit for any length of time in a fitting out dock. He leant forward and, in a mint-flavoured whisper, said, “Actually, my friend, there is nothing new in that.”
Apparently, the fate of a ship called the Titanic demonstrated this principle in the mid-Atlantic as long ago as 1912. Not even the largest vessel in the world could sail on undisturbed when part of its hull was missing.
The principle of “objective disachievement” underpins what Yousaf calls a “progressive agenda” for ferry construction. If the pre-nationalisation management at Ferguson’s had been more up-to-date, he said, it could have expanded the original two-year contract for two vessels to a nine-year project for only one of them and a no-limit period for the second, as is now the case.
In the event, it took government intervention to achieve that. With state involvement, this can be done as easily as shredding an accounting paper-trail. That is the basic message I am going to take back from Morocco to Edinburgh.
In a postscript to my report, I suggest that this approach could be applied to the whole of Scottish industry. For a new leader with boldness and vision, and a cross-cutting, sector-neutral approach to progressive disachievement, the sky’s the limit.
For those who wish to restore the beauty of Scotland’s pre-industrial seascape in the Hebrides, the Fergusons workforce can show the way by ensuring that no-one ever hammers in the last rivet. Once the full implications of this new way of doing shipbuilding sinks in, the world will look in awe at another first from industrial Scotland. The phrase “Clyde built” will take on an entirely new meaning.
It was for playing their part in achieving this transformation that post-nationalisation managers at Fergusons were paid the £87,000 bonuses which have been in the news recently. Some call them “failure bonuses”, but those who do should spend a smoky night drinking sweet tea on the Grand Socco in Tangier and sampling the wisdom of the global south. Only after that will they be able to appreciate the scale of the achievement we are witnessing on the lower Clyde today. Wha’s like us?
–––
Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon.co.uk and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
If you appreciated this article please share and follow us on Twitter here – and like and comment on facebook here. Help support ThinkScotland publishing these articles by making a donation here.
