Jersey naval flashpoint
A DAY after the foreign secretaries of the world’s richest economies met at the G7 summit in London to applaud themselves for the return of international diplomacy, France and Britain find themselves sending armed naval vessels to sea in a spat over shellfish.
“We’re ready for war,” blared the Daily Mail tabloid in all caps. Not over cod, certainly? But never underestimate the hot politics of fishing rights. It almost scuttled the Brexit trade deal between Britain and the EU – and the after-effects are still being sorted out.
As of yesterday morning, Britain has sent not one but two Royal Navy ships – the HMS Tamar and HMS Severn – to the little island of Jersey in the English Channel. Jersey is a British Crown dependency, although it’s about 23km off the French coast.
France also responded, deploying the Military Ops ship Athos, now steaming toward the island to carry out a “patrol mission”. A second French vessel, the FS Themis, was reported en route. Images of the harbour of Saint Helier on island of Jersey showed dozens of French fishing trawlers and dredgers bobbing in the waters inside and just off the port, firing smoke and light flares. The French fleet is angry because Jersey is requiring skippers who want a licence to rake the sea floor to deploy the most modern equipment and also prove that they have fished in the island’s waters in previous years – requirements that some captains complain are expensive or hard to fulfil.
The French fisherfolk are threatening to “blockade” the harbour and stop cargo ships from entering or exiting. In one scene, a French boat can be seen ramming another vessel.
Josh Dearing, owner of the The Jersey Catch fishing company, told the Press Association news agency: “I looked from the shore this morning and it was just like a sea of red lights and flares already going off at sea. It was like an invasion.”
English and Jersey fishing boats are also in the waters, creating the potential for conflict. It would not be the first time that British and French fleet tangled. In 2018, in an episode dubbed the “Great Scallop War”, the antagonists purposefully slammed into each other’s boats in a skirmish over fishing rights. War rhetoric has been a recurrent theme. French fishermen earlier complained that their own government had “declared war” on them by pursuing plans for an offshore wind farm to the south of Jersey.
This week the attention shifted toward escalating tensions with Britain, when France’s Minister for the Sea, Annick Girardin, threatened retaliatory measures over post-Brexit fishing rights. “Regarding Jersey, I remind you of the delivery of electricity along underwater cables,” she told MPs, noting that the island state gets most of its power from mainland France. “We’ll do it if we have to,” Girardin said.
Jersey is not a member nation of the UK, but a self-governing British Crown Dependency, and Britain provides for its defence. The 100000 residents speak English (and often French), use the pound sterling and mostly make their money by providing offshore financial services.
France’s junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, vowed that France “won’t be intimidated”. He said he had earlier spoken to David Frost, the British cabinet minister responsible for relations with the EU.
Don Thompson, president of Jersey Fishermen’s Association, said that the
French were deploying “intimidating and bullying tactics”. The threat to cut off electricity to the island would have huge consequences. “Hospitals would close, babies would die in hospitals, it’s not something taken lightly,” he said.
Thompson described the scene yesterday. He said there were about 100 French trawlers sitting in the mouth of local harbour, and two UK Royal Navy ships and a French warship on the scene. He said that the French boats were “stopping the food supply chain” as the “big ferry that sails between here and the mainland, carrying 95% of our food, is stuck in the port”. The French fishermen are upset that they now have to get licences from the Jersey authority, which have various conditions, including on the styles and types of fishing equipment allowed.
Though Jersey lies closer to France than England, it is not a part of the EU, though before Brexit, it was effectively treated as if it were in the EU when it came to the free trade of goods. Now that Britain is out of the bloc and new Brexit trade agreements and access rights are coming into force, locals in Jersey are feeling an impact.