Greed, not EU, sank our fishing industry
Another week, another broken promise by the Brexiteers. In the referendum campaign they promised to give £350million to our NHS every week.
A policy made on the back of a fag packet and promoted on the side of a bus.
Now we discover the contract to make the iconic passports will be given to a French-Dutch company.
The existing burgundy passport – so hated by the leavers – was made by a British company which lost out on getting the new contract from the Home Office.
But the biggest lie perpetuated by Brexiteers like Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg is that we would instantly take back control of our fishing industry.
This week, Gove – now Environment Secretary – had to admit we would stay in the EU Commons Fisheries Policy until 2020.
But it’s not EU quotas that have led to the collapse of the fishing industry. It’s the fact that for years we have over-fished.
My constituency of Hull, a city with a proud fishing industry, increasingly saw men lose their lives as they fished further and further overseas in dangerous conditions to maintain their profits.
Fifty years ago, three Hull trawlers sank within weeks of each other with the loss of 58 lives. Poor safety standards by money-driven shipping bosses led to this tragedy.
The industry even ran a yearly contest presenting a silver cod to the firm with the largest catch. In its drive to win and continue over-fishing, men’s lives were put at risk. I protested outside the awards ceremony with a papiermâché cod covered in red paint.
This over-fishing led to our so-called “cod wars” with Iceland.
Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy wasn’t wholly responsible for the collapse of Hull’s trawler industry. Decades of over-fishing led to a huge depletion in stocks, with the fish being harvested at a much faster rate than they could reproduce.
By 1977, the UK was landing a million tonnes of fish a year.
In 2011, it was projected that only eight per cent of the 136 fish stocks in European waters would be at sustainable levels by 2022.
EU quotas on fishing were a way of controlling over-fishing to allow fish stocks to increase so we could have a sustainable industry.
And the UK had the secondlargest allocation.
But it is clear countries like France and Spain didn’t even inform the EU how much fish they were landing, so over-fishing continued.
Also, technology led to smaller vessels being replaced by huge trawlers over-fishing on an industrial scale.
It was the greed and profit maximisation of the industry that has affected our coastal communities, not the EU. Ironically, the UK fishing industry is in much better shape than any of our EU partners.
Profits are continuing to grow and are the highest across the EU.
And the Government actually decides how its EU fishing quota is distributed.
If it really cared about the fishing industry, it would ensure these coastal communities with smaller vessels were allowed to fish more.
Instead, we have larger foreign vessels being registered in the UK but landing their fish overseas.
Brexit won’t change that. The Government can but it has done nothing.
According to academics and other experts, leaving the EU and the quota system will actually lead to more over-fishing and could finish off our industry for good.
Nigel Farage and his cod bores might have thought it would be a hilarious stunt to throw haddock over the side of a fishing boat to protest about us remaining in the Common Fisheries Policy until we leave in 2020.
But thanks to their blinkered pursuit of a brutal Brexit, the longterm future of our UK fishing industry could be thrown overboard too.