There could be no more eloquent epitaph on the destruction of Britain’s once-proud fishing industry than the recent revelation that 23 per cent of the entire fishing quota Brussels allows Britain now goes to a single giant Dutch trawler, the Cornelis Vrolijk, to land all its catches in Holland.
Few people under 50 can recall a time when Britain had Europe’s largest fishing fleet and 80 per cent of all its fishing waters.
But back in the 1990s, this column was almost alone in reporting what had followed after Edward Heath was so desperate to enter “Europe” that he gave way to Brussels’s new demand (not even legally authorised by the treaties) that all fishing waters must be merged as a “common European resource”.
The only way fishing rights could then be parcelled out among the member states was by a complex system of national “quotas”, which allowed Britain’s fishermen just 13 per cent by value of this new “common resource”. To allow everyone a share required drastic cuts in fleet sizes, such as the time when we were ordered to make a further 19 per cent cut, while Spain’s huge fleet lost only 4 per cent.
This was hailed by John Gummer, our then-fisheries minister, as “a good deal” for our fishermen.
But another inevitable consequence of the new system was the appalling “discards” scandal, forcing fishermen to chuck back into the sea millions of dead fish for which they had no quota.
Eventually, I found this dreadful story so depressing that I stopped reporting it. Now, years later, after yet another dismal meeting in Brussels, we are told the environmental “discards” disaster has been ended. Fishermen must now bring all their catch back to land. But only so that millions of fish can now be discarded to landfill instead.
So Britain’s fleet continues to shrink, while 43 per cent of the UK’s quota has now been bought up by foreign-owned vessels
(32 per cent going to just five boats, including the Cornelis Vrolijk). And still we hear our latest fisheries minister telling us that this new deal represents “the best possible” outcome for Britain. Bah, humbug.
British fishermen's 'bitterness' over the EUFishing has been a way of life for generations around Scotland's Northeast Coast. But it's never been easy making a living at sea. And trawlermen say it has been made much harder by rules imposed by the European Union. Since the introduction of the Common Fisheries policy hundreds of boats have been scrapped, thousands of jobs lost. 20 years ago this harbour would have been packed with fishing boats that'd be stacked three, four boats deep. Now the fleet is just a fraction of the size it used to be, and fishermen say that is all the fault of the European Union. Trawlermen are angry because they feel they have lost control of their own waters, the Common fisheries policy sets quotas telling fishermen exactly what they can and can't catch. It was designed to conserve stocks, as well as allow equal access to the fishing grounds for boats of other EU countries, like France and Spain.
"Round about our coasts, there's very very rich fishing grounds, and the EU fishermen get really good days using them here."
"If we were to leave the EU there'd still be French and Spanish fishermen boats in the waters that you fish, wouldn't there?"
"Yes of course there would be, but they would be under our rules. Mean we're not saying there's got to be no Spanish, or no French here, we might have to let some of them in to get access to their market. But they'd be under our rules and our quotas, and we would get - hopefully - we would get a bigger share of the fish that's out of our waters."
Brisk business at the fish market at Peterhead doesn't ease the bitterness most of the fishing industry feel towards the EU. But many admit, much hated quotas have helped fishing stocks in the North Sea to recover, and a few fear that could be put at risk. My fear of leaving the European Union is that at the end of that, we'd have a European free for all which would devastate our stocks and knock the industry back 10 years, whilst legal arguments were going on over who had access to what, where and how. If we have a European fishing fleet that thinks they're going to get thrown out of the rich British fisheries, they could have a massive impact on destroying it before any agreement is put in place.
As with so much of the EU debate, no one really knows what the future of fishing might look like if there is a Brexit. What would it mean for the exports of fish to France and Spain, or the large numbers of EU migrants who process the fish ready for sale. Whatever happens, the industry is convinced it has to be better than the status quo.
This industry is not so much a job than a way of life, to see your whole heritage and whole way of life devastated for a political project, we're ultimately made to beg for our own fish from Brussel's table. And it's a national tragedy what's happened to the fishing industry and it's what's happening to our country as a whole.
British trawlermen feel they have been cheated out of fishing rights that ought to be theirs by birth. And they believe, only by leaving the EU, can they regain control of the waters that provide their livelihood.
Between Britain and Ireland, we two nations accounted for
60 percent of the EU's waters. Where our exclusive economic zone once extended beyond 200 nautical miles, it now extends 12. Billions of fish were caught and discarded because of the quotas, with UK ports more active in the 19th century than today. In the Seventies, Britain and Greenland held around 80 percent of fish stocks, whilst France, Spain and Italy had depleted the Mediterranean. Whilst Greenland left the EU to protect their fishing stocks, we joined because our politicians were retarded. The original six Common Market members realized that the four countries applying to join the Common Market at that time (Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Norway) controlled the richest fishing grounds in the world. The original six drew up the
Council Regulation 2141/70 giving all members equal access to all fishing waters, even though the Treaty of Rome gave them no authority to do so. This was adopted on the morning of the 30th of June 1970 a few hours before the applications were received, ensuring that the new members were obliged to accept the regulation as they joined and would not be able to dispute it after becoming members. The UK initially refused, but eventually signed the Accession Treaty on the 22nd January 1972, handing over four fifths of all the fish off Western Europe to the European common good.
Thus we got fucked.
It's historical. Historically, when first introduced in the 1960s, fish quota amongst the nations were not determined by national borders, but by specialization.
Belgians are traditionally catchers of sole. Dutch fishermen are known for their flatfish. German fishermen catch hakes / pollocks. UK fishermen favoured cod.
The fish quotas were determined by how much they could rip out of the UK, British fisheries were specialized in every sort of fish and shellfish in our waters because our fishing industry was that large - even postwar, 40,000 fishermen were regularly employed in the UK in the 50s.
Red Line marks the opening of our stocks to Europe's benign altruism
Stats from these gitstabled by these gits, this git just added a red line
The EU did more damage to British fishing than the Kaiser and Fuhrer
It's surreal
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