Where to order your post-Brexit fish

It’s Lent, and you know what that means? Fish, that’s what. Once, the point of the whole fast and abstinence thing was to eschew meat, which meant eating fish instead. Indeed, the fish-fasting association was so important for the fishing industry that when the Reformation came, much Catholic practice was jettisoned, but not the obligation to eat fish in Lent.

Now, there’s a further rationale, two in fact. Brexit, plus Covid, a double whammy for the industry. Post Brexit, there are endless impediments to exporting to the EU, formerly an enthusiastic taker of British fish and shellfish, unless suppliers are lucky enough to be part of a bigger consortium which handles the paperwork and even if you do the whole process is more expensive. Lorries which once could drop fish off in London en route to France can’t do so now. Then the enforced closure of restaurants and hotels, here and in the EU, took away fish producers’ main domestic market.