RIVER OF DESPAIR

CAMPAIGNERS are pleading with the government to bring the privatised River Clyde back into public hands.

- BY DAN VEVERS Chief Reporter

MSP Paul Sweeney has said public ownership is the best way forward after “decades of decline”.

Peel Ports, owned by billionaire John Whittaker, 83, took over 450 square miles of docks, shipyards and waterways in the west of Scotland in the 90s in a £184million deal. The firm later merged with Clydeport PLC in 2003.

However Glasgow MSP Sweeney, crime writer Louise Welsh and architect Jude Barber, want the privatisation reversed.

Sweeney said: “The Tory government's decision in 1991 to privatise the Clyde Port Authority was calamitous, and in the decades that have followed, it has been in a pattern of managed decline.

“It is quite extraordinary that a private Bill was passed in the House of Commons effectively granting quasi-legislative control to a private enterprise to manage 450 square miles of riverine land in the west of Scotland, with significant legal privileges and by-laws, including the management of the riverbed itself.