UK to take back control on fishing and farming

Brussels quotas will be dumped on Day One of Brexit

BRITAIN will take back control of farming and fishing policy as soon as it leaves the Eu, Theresa May said yesterday.

In a surprise move, the Prime Minister told MPs the uK would pull out of the controversial Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy in March 2019.

It comes despite plans for a two-year transitional deal when large aspects of Eu membership are likely to remain unchanged. The decision represents a significant victory for Environment Secretary Michael Gove, who has warned it would be unacceptable for brussels to continue to set annual fishing quotas after the uK leaves the trading bloc.

It came as Mrs May’s brexit ‘war cabinet’ debated the Government’s negotiating aims on trade for the first time.

Pro-brexit ministers emerged upbeat from the 90-minute discussion, which focused on the degree to which the uK should be free to ‘diverge’ from Eu rules after leaving.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson joined boris Johnson, Liam Fox and Mr Gove in arguing that any agreement must leave britain free to strike its own trade deals and cut red tape.

Chancellor Philip Hammond and Home Secretary Amber Rudd are said to have struck a more ‘cautious’ tone on the issue, arguing that significant divergence from Eu rules could have implications for access to the single market and the status of the Northern Ireland border.

but a Cabinet source said the ‘majority’ of the ten-strong committee backed the idea of ‘gradual divergence’.

Mrs May will discuss the issue with the full Cabinet today, but a final decision is not expected until next year.

Fishing and farming are two of the most heavily regulated aspects of the uK’s Eu membership. The £50billion Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) accounts for almost 40 per cent of the Eu’s entire budget and has been a byword for waste and inefficiency for years.

The uK’s share of the cost amounts to more than £6billion a year, but british farmers only receive about £3billion in subsidies. The policy helped create socalled ‘wine lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’ as farmers boosted production to maximise payments.

Mr Gove has argued the uK should be free now to decide how the money is spent. The Environment Secretary, a leading figure in the Leave campaign, has also pushed for early exit from the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which sets quotas for how much fish each country can catch in british waters.

under the policy, the uK is allowed to catch about 13 per cent of the five million tonnes landed by Eu boats each year – despite estimates that half the total is caught in british waters.

The Prime Minister told MPs yesterday she wanted the uK to leave both the CFP and CAP on 29 March 2019. She added: ‘The relationship we have on both those issues continuing through the implementation period with the European union will be part of the negotiation of that period which will start very soon.’

The PM faced criticism from Eurosceptics in the Commons as she reported back on the brexit divorce deal struck in brussels last week.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said a decision to follow Eu laws during the transition period would make the uK ‘no more than a vassal state, a colony, a serf of the European union’. He urged her to ‘show mettle and steel in rejecting these rather hostile negotiating terms from the Eu’.

‘Show mettle and steel’