Cod War II? Tell the EU to sling its hook
AS A fORMER trawler skipper heavily involved in the so-called Cod Wars during the Seventies, I am interested that political commentators are talking about the possibility of a new Cod War after December 2020. This is in reaction to the french having the brass neck to tell us that their fishing rights within our waters are non-negotiable. It’s about time our politicians started to stand up to our continental friends. The Cod Wars were fought over Iceland seeking to expand its territorial limits and prevent its fisheries being overexploited. The UK’s negotiations for joining the Common Market or EEC, as it was then, coincided with this. To understand the impact of the betrayal of our fishing industry, we need to go back to the Seventies when Conservative prime minister Edward Heath was manipulated by the french into allowing the best of our fishing grounds to be given away without any proper authority or consultation with Parliament or the British people. During the negotiations, the french hijacked the fisheries meetings and were pushing for fishing to be treated as a common resource with equal access for all, which the British and Irish governments initially rejected. The deep-sea trawler owners, then the most powerful players in the British fishing industry, were in favour because they thought Iceland and Norway would eventually join and they would have unbridled access to their rich waters, cancelling out the Cod Wars’ losses. But Iceland and Norway rejected the EEC because of the fishing rights and the rest is history. It is worth considering just how much of that thinking was driving the lobbying to a gullible Government in not accepting any of the very fair deals Iceland was offering. We never suspected these European fleets would eventually establish ‘historic rights’ to control our fishing grounds, aided by massive EU grants, not only from their own governments but also from us. Decommissioning schemes to reduce the British fleet were brought in and our fishermen were put out of work, while other nations, with the help of European grants, increased and modernised their fleets. The Spanish fleet was bigger than the rest of Europe’s combined, but when they joined the EEC they declared they would not decommission even one vessel. They not only got away with that, they also secured grants to scrap, rebuild and modernise 850 of their fishing boats. The french, Belgians and Spanish seem able to fish with impunity, while our fishermen are persecuted because we’ve got to be seen to be fair. We have not had one fisheries minister worth their salt. I was in Brussels for several December Councils when our minister never came out with the quota he went in with. It was always cut to the benefit of the other states, resulting in us being a minority in our own waters. Can someone explain that?
tOM watSOn, Fleetwood, Lancs.