The Tall Ships at sea are a beautiful sight: we should build many more of them

The Columbian ship the Gloria at Greenock for the Tall Ships Race. Photograph: Hemedia

Here is a vital component of a new national plan, some blue-sky (or fair-wind) thinking for Vince Cable and Iain Duncan Smith.

We should build ships from renewable wood and power them with renewable wind and crew them with equally renewable supplies of young men and women aged 16 to 20 who are paid much less than the minimum wage, if they are paid at all, but are "all found" (if I remember my sea lore correctly) when it comes to bunk and board. The ships would be labour intensive. All wheels, windlasses and capstans to be turned by hand, sails to be raised by halyards, masts to be scaled by ratlines, anchors to be weighed to the sound of "heave-ho". A wind turbine on the stern and some photoelectric cells on the poop deck might power the ship's radio and refrigerate the medical supplies. As to the cargo, anything non-perishable or nearly so: out to China with whisky and in again with toys, grain from America, fresh water from the Scottish highlands to the parched horticulture of Spain, investment bankers to the sweaty penal servitude of Devil's Island.

Think [I thought, in Greenock] of the benefits. Zero carbon emissions, shipbuilding yards and their old skills restored to the banks of the Clyde and the Tyne, no more degrees in Rubbish Studies from the alleged university of X, teenage obesity and apathy hit on the head, binge drinking confined to sailors ashore who hold each other up at bus stops while singing shanties about the Rio Grande.

The lives of future generations would be immeasurably enriched. "The demanding work and often unpredictable nature [of sailing ship life] requires a high degree of interaction, providing real physical and emotional challenges," says the careers brochure for my newly-founded Utopia Line. "Our crew complete their voyages with increased confidence, responsibility, respect, resilience and ability to work as part of a team. They will have gained skills, qualifications, friends and treasured memories that make a lasting difference to their community and society in general."

In fact, the quote isn't mine. It's taken unchanged from the publicity for Ocean Youth Trust Scotland and it represents an almost religious conviction about the social and moral benefits of sail training that has held sway in Europe and the Americas for at least 60 years. Thanks to this faith, an event of eye-moistening beauty happens every summer in the form of the Tall Ships Race, which this year started a fortnight ago in Ireland at Waterford and will end in Sweden at Halmstad during the first week of August: a progress including stops in Greenock, Lerwick and Stavanger. Nearly 60 ships are making the voyage (as I write, most are somewhere in the Minch) and they come in all shapes and sizes. An eligible "tall ship" – the phrase comes from Masefield's poem – is defined by the race organisers, Sail Training International, as a "monohull sailing vessel of more than 9.14m waterline length" that has at least 50% of her crew aged between 15 and 25. The biggest tend to come from the Netherlands, eastern Europe and Scandinavia, but a third of this year's fleet sail under the British flag, including the 1924 Brixham ketch called Provident that had our 17-year-old son aboard.

We met him at Greenock. How had it been? Good: there had been some wonderful sights. Leaving Waterford, the 100-strong crew of a Columbian three-masted barque, the Gloria, stood to attention high on the yardarms as they sang their national anthem; dolphins followed their own boat; off Kintyre, a mist came down and the sea was so still that ducks left a wake on its surface and the Provident drifted stern-first over the finishing line. The work has been interesting and the night watches demanding. He had encountered likeable people. The first officer, Magda, came from Poland and the bosun, Matt, from Italy. For nine days he had been part of a real community. I thought: at one time, the time of Kipling and Baden Powell, it would have been called "the brotherhood of the sea".

We walked beside the ships lined along the James Watt Dock, judging the handsomest (the Sorlandet of Norway, in my contested view) and admiring the enterprise that had made the Lord Nelson fit for sail trainees in wheelchairs. There were big crowds everywhere – half a million people were expected in Greenock for the Tall Ships' four-day stay – and they milled about in the face-painting tents, tattoo salons and fine burger bars without which no British festival is complete. Lulu and The Magic Numbers had sung onstage. The Red Arrows were due overhead the next day. Greenock has seen no bigger occasion since the Tall Ships' last visit in 1999.

Shipbuilding left the town in the 1980s and sugar refining soon after, and call-centre jobs haven't stemmed a steep decline in the town's population. James Watt was born here in 1736. The highest rate in Europe for alcohol-induced Korsakoff's psychosis, a form of brain damage, is Greenock's newer distinction.

Many Greenockians, however, continue to love ships and remember they once knew how to build them. The Greenock Telegraph has dropped "and Clyde Shipping Gazette" from its masthead, but still carries a column by that name to report the sparse comings and goings in the upper estuary, while a replica of Britain's first saltwater steamship, the Comet, stands over the wall from Tesco. Steam navigation was perfected on the Clyde and made it famous, throwing into shadow the sailing ships that were also built on the river, particularly in Greenock and Port Glasgow, until the early years of the last century.

The Tall Ships Race, in fact, was born in the 1950s in imitation of the China tea clipper and Australian grain races that gripped the public imagination in the 1860s and 1930s, when many of the ships that competed – the Cutty Sark, the Ariel, the Moshulu – were produced by the imagination and craft of Clyde yards.

This week I stood at the end of a quay in Greenock and looked over the water to Dumbarton Rock, behind which a shipyard nestled for more than a century. The Cutty Sark, launched there in 1869, is an early example of ship preservation – together with Nelson's Victory, the clipper was saved from the fate of a rotting hulk in 1922.

Next spring the Cutty Sark will re-open to visitors in Greenwich, restored to pristine condition after the ruinous fire of four years ago. The cost has been enormous – an estimate of ?46m to replace timber and fittings and have the ship made safe and accessible as a static museum. How much of her can now be said to be "genuine" (meaning ex Dumbarton, 1869) and wouldn't the money have been better spent on a working replica, exact in its details down to the last piece of rope? I guess that ?46m would have made that easily possible.

Sailing ships need to be sailed; they sit in dry docks like stuffed racehorses. All down the Clyde this week thousands of people lined the shore to see them go as their white flapping canvas tried to catch a zephyr on a calm day. Aesthetically, it's a sight hard to equal. Given that the ships have a moral purpose too – an escape, if you like, from Korsakoff's psychosis – the only conclusion must be that we should build more of them.

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