France must realise that Brexit Britain won’t take the bait
OVER THE years we have become used to belligerent acts on the part of French workers, such as wildcat strikes in ports or the settinglight of UK-produced lamb on the autoroute. The culture of the barricades has persisted long after the demise of Marie Antoinette.
Yet the behaviour of fishermen who yesterday blockaded the port of St Helier on Jersey makes the jaw drop. When the leader of a public body threatens a neighbouring country with the words “we are ready for war”, as the head of the Normandy and Brittany fishing authority did on Wednesday, it is a very serious business.
Far from trying to calm things down, Emmanuel Macron’s government has sought to escalate the dispute. On Wednesday the maritime minister threatened to pull the plug on Jersey’s electricity supply, much of which is imported from France via undersea cables.
As one Jersey minister com- mented, even the Nazis kept the lights on during their occupation of the island in the Second World War.
While Macron might pose as a statesman, he is really no better than Donald Trump.
HE TRIED a similar trick during last year’s lastminute negotiations for an EU-UK trade deal, when he briefly prevented lorries entering Britain on the pretext of Covid precautions.
Thankfully, our own government has refused to rise to the bait. Yes, we have sent naval vessels, as is necessary to keep the peace given the threats which have been made, but there has been no intemperate language from Downing Street.
But there will have to be repercussions from this incident. It is intolerable to have fishing fleets behaving like bands of pirates. Britain agreed, as part of the trade negotiations, to continue to allow French fishing boats to access
UK waters they have fished for decades. But that was on the assumption that they would operate in a civilised fashion.
Much as I sympathise with anyone suddenly burdened with bureaucracy, the licences for which French fishing boats have had to apply to access waters off Jersey are a lot less of an imposition than many petty rules with which UK exporters to the EU have found themselves obliged to comply.
Moreover, the regulation of fisheries is vital if we are to continue to enjoy eating fish from around our shores. Poor management by the EU over the past decades has, at times, brought fish stocks dangerously close to collapse.
EU fishing fleets are going to have to accept that we will be making the rules in UK waters in future – and that we will be trying to do it more effectively than the EU has done.
There is a more general rule that we need to learn from this incident: that we must build national resilience and greater self-sufficiency in vital supplies like food and energy. During the Second World War we learned the hard way about being over-dependent on food imports, when Hitler blew up trans-Atlantic supply ships.
After the war, security of food supply was taken very seriously, with huge effort put into agricultural improvement.
BUT over the past three decades we have grown complacent as we began to take free trade for granted, and EU rules forced us to set aside farmland.
In 2018 we produced 61 per cent of the food consumed here, down from a peak of 78 per cent in 1984. It isn’t just food. Like Jersey, Britain is importing increasing amounts of electricity from France and the Netherlands – used to balance intermittent supplies of wind and solar energy. Fortunately, it turns out that Jersey has retained a back-up, oil-fired power station capable of supplying the island in an emergency. But that kind of facility might not always be there.
Thankfully, a physical war between Britain and neighbouring countries remains no more than a remote threat. But as we have seen this week, and in recent months, we are moving into an era in which nations and trade blocs are becoming far more prepared to use the threat of punitive tariffs and trade blockades to get their way.
It happened with the EU threatening to block vaccine exports and it happened with Macron closing Channel ports. We need to be up to this, and to develop a national resilience plan. Rewilding is all very well, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of food production.
Global trade is a wonderful thing, which has enriched us all by giving us access to the best goods and services from all over the world. But there are limits on how much we should make ourselves reliant on essential supplies from abroad. We need to be prepared for growing belligerence over global trade, and not just from France.
‘Even the Nazis kept the lights on during their occupation of Jersey’