After the euro, this was the EU’s most catastrophic folly

How forlorn was the sight of that little flotilla of fishing boats sailing up to Westminster to call for Brexit, being screeched at by Sir Bob Geldof and his pro-Remain friends. When Britain joined the Common Market in 1973, we not only had the richest and best-managed fishing waters in the world but also the most successful fishing fleet in Europe.

From the early Nineties on, I regularly chronicled the infinitely melancholy consequences of Edward Heath’s reckless readiness to hand over those waters as a “common European resource”.

The resulting Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which divvied out fishing rights under a quota system, resulted in a double disaster, both social and ecological.

In the name of integration, this crazily bureaucratic quota system inevitably forced fishermen to dump billions of dead fish back into the sea every year. And, by the way the CFP was imposed, to allow foreign fleets far greater access to those previously well-managed waters, we also saw Britain’s own fishing industry shrinking to a mere ghost of what it had been.

A remarkably similar disaster unfolded round the coasts of Africa, where Brussels, under the same CFP, paid vast sums to allow EU fishing fleets to pillage the waters of poor African nations in much the same social and ecologically destructive fashion.

What made this tragic shambles even more painful was to discover, as I did in 2001 under the 30-year rule, a hitherto secret document showing that in 1971 the Brussels Council of Ministers had been made well aware by its own lawyers that there was nothing in the Treaty of Rome that could authorise any aspect of a CFP. The entire system was thus wholly illegal (and was only much later craftily legitimised by the treaty of Maastricht).

Of all the catastrophes brought about by the attempt to impose a supranational form of government on Europe, none – apart, of course, from the euro – was more deluded, unworkable and unnecessary.