I wrote last week of my fear that we’ll never ‘take back control of our fish’, as Brexiteers ardently wish, because the rights of UK fishermen — whose diminished industry contributes less than half a per cent of GDP — will be too easy to give away in the next negotiating phase. Sure enough, last Sunday’s Brussels summit to approve the withdrawal agreement produced an explicit warning from President Emmanuel Macron that unless the UK allows continuing access into its waters for EU (meaning specifically French) fishing boats, he may veto a wider trade deal, which means the hated ‘backstop’ would come into force instead.
That’s quite a threat, reflecting both Macron’s urgent need to deflect rising hostility towards him at home, seen in violent fuel tax protests, and the fact that a third of the catch of France’s northern fishing fleet comes from UK waters. What’s less well known about this battlefront is just how enfeebled our British forces are, after decades of attrition under the Common Fisheries Policy. Reports say half of all the fish quotas allocated under the CFP to English vessels have actually been sold to Spanish, Dutch and Icelandic interests, which operate through UK-registered companies but land UK catch in their own home ports. For Wales, the proportion of quota sold, largely to one Spanish company, is 88 per cent.
Some EU countries forbid the sale of fish quotas, but we allow it presumably because our reduced fleet no longer has the capacity to catch all the fish available in UK waters. The upshot is that even if we ‘took back control’, we could end up selling it back to the continentals. Theresa May’s team knows this and hence, I suspect, regards fishing as a disposable bargaining chip, but that will never play well with voters in coastal constituencies.
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