TIDE OF CHANGE
How can we trust our politicians to police the high seas when they have made such a pig’s ear of policing our inshore waters? asks Richard Bath
Can the Scottish Government be trusted to save our seas?
With 75% of British fish landed in Scottish ports, there is a strong argument for the future governance of our offshore marine environment to be driven largely from Scotland, a genuine possibility which Brexit should bring a step nearer. That prospect hardened when the transitional outcome on fishing policy concluded between British Brexit negotiators and their EU counterparts – a preservation of the status quo – provoked huge disappointment across the Scottish political spectrum. ‘There is no spinning this as a good outcome,’ said Douglas Ross, the Conservative MP for Moray, a constituency that includes several fishing villages. ‘It would be easier to get someone to drink a pint of cold sick than try to sell this as a success.’
Thanks to the transition period, we effectively now have two years before there is any immediate prospect of any change in the status of Scotland’s offshore waters, so why don’t our politicians use that time wisely by proving that they can actually run the nautical equivalent of a piss-up in a brewery. And they do desperately need to establish some credibility in this area because since devolution, our government’s governance of Scotland’s inshore waters has been pitiful.
In three areas devolved to Holyrood – fish farming, scallop dredging and plastic pollution – the levels of incompetence, inertia and (just occasionally) mendacity have been awe-inspiring. The good news is that our elected representatives are slowly but surely inching their way towards a better outcome on all three, even if the progress has been painfully slow.
Take fish farming. When Alex Salmond was first minister he encouraged the expansion of sea-farmed salmon to up to 400,000 tonnes by 2030. The rationale of jobs in remote areas was allowed to obviate any damage to the marine environment, damage which is finally being officially acknowledged. For two months, Holyrood’s all-party Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee looked at fish farming before releasing a preliminary report which lays bare the MSPs’ horror at what they have found.
‘Scotland is at a critical point in considering how salmon farming develops in a sustainable way in relation to the environment,’ wrote convener Graeme Dey MSP. ‘If the current issues are not addressed, expansion will be unsustainable and may cause irrecoverable damage to the environment. The status quo is not an option. The sector is [not] being regulated sufficiently, or regulated sufficiently effectively. This needs to be addressed urgently.’
While Holyrood bares its teeth on fish farming, it should also look at another vexed maritime bugbear – the dredging of the 31 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) which exist to protect our most fragile inshore eco-systems. In particular it should focus on the government’s complete unwillingness to engage with the subject of enforcement.
Without effective enforcement MPAs are unprotected and worthless. Currently Marine Scotland boats refuse to go out at night (when illegal dredging happens), citing health and safety concerns. Meanwhile, law-breaking scallop dredgers turn off their AIS system – a marine tachograph – to avoid a paper trail, and smash the equipment of creelers who have the temerity to complain about the MPAs being dredged.
There have been cases of creeling gear worth £50,000 being smashed or simply towed away. Intimidation in small rural communities is a real issue.
The government’s response to crimes committed at sea that would never be tolerated on land? Either blame the messenger (usually the small, static fishermen who make up 80% of Scotland’s fleet) or simply rebrand the problem, turning scallop dredging into ‘scallop fishing’ and criminal damage to creels into ‘gear conflict’.
This is no secret. Everyone knows it’s going on, with responsible scallop dredgers such as John McAlister as appalled by the damage as environmentalists and static fishermen. It comes to something when the local MSP is so exasperated that he uses the local newspaper to try and kick Marine Scotland into action.
‘Illegal practices have been reported to both the local fishery officer and Marine Scotland, neither of whom appear to have acted,’ said Green MSP John Finnie to the Oban Times regarding the nightly dredging of the Loch Sunart to Sound of Jura MPA. ‘I’ve written to cabinet secretaries Roseanna Cunningham for the environment and Fergus Ewing for fisheries, asking that they initiate an immediate inquiry into what’s going on.
‘Dredging is an entirely destructive practice which can cause irreparable damage and must be controlled. Scotland is a maritime nation and yet, unlike Wales, which is building new protection vessels, we apparently have no plans to enhance our fisheries’ protection capability. Clearly, there’s no point in having protected areas if they are not policed.’
We love to laud the Scandinavians, yet only follow their lead when it suits us. Norway, for instance, bans many fish farming practices common here because they are environmentally ruinous. After briefly allowing scallop dredging in the 1980s before recoiling in horror at the devastation, Norway also banned dredging and now have what is widely acknowledged as the world’s most fecund marine eco-system.
A third area where thankfully we are learning from Norway, concerns the plastic bottles which litter our shorelines. Norway has a 10-25p deposit scheme for cans and bottles, which has led to 96% of plastic bottles being recycled. In Scotland, such a scheme could save local authorities an estimated £3m a year in litter collection. Last year, Nicola Sturgeon announced that we would follow suit – albeit almost 20 years after recycling programme Remade was launched, 11 years after the SNP took control at Holyrood and 46 years after Norway’s first plastic bottle banks appeared.
Better late than never I suppose.