‘We need to take advantage of the Brexit sea of opportunity’
independent Coastal State. The UK is fortunate to have some of the richest fishing grounds in the world around its shorelines, where most of the major species are harvested sustainably.
Yet under the CFP the allowance for catching this natural resource – highquality seafood, rich in protein and nutrients with proven benefits for our health, much sought after in international markets – is divvied up every year and most of it (around two-thirds) handed, gratis, to vessels from other EU countries.
In the talks that take place to refresh this annual absurdity, landlocked nations without so much as a single trawler, e.g. Austria, have the same power as those with fishing traditions stretching back thousands of years. And they use it, believe me!
Comparisons with other sectors are useful to highlight how invidious this state of 2020. What will happen between now and then is that UK and EU negotiators will attempt to devise a specific fisheries agreement.
We fully expect the EU nations that are heavily dependent on access to our waters – Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands as well as France – to press forcefully for this to be a multi-year agreement that permits the tariff-free trading in EU markets of UK seafood, but only in return for specific guarantees of access to UK waters for their vessels.
As we have made clear time and time again, this is simply unacceptable in principle. It contravenes all international norms and practice. And UK ministers must be true to their word and resist all attempts to fashion such an agreement.
In conclusion, let me clear up one particular facet of the question of access that always gets lost in the heated arguments that surround fisheries.
The UK industry has never – never – said that it wishes to see access to our waters denied to the skippers of EU vessels.
That would be a silly goal, simply because it often makes good sense to reach mutually beneficial arrangements on access to each others’ waters.
These sorts of arrangements are part of the warp and weft of the Coastal States talks every year.
The point is that they are the outcome of free and fair negotiations and not the enforced result of a prior agreement that binds participants to a particular course of action year after year.
That would be CFP redux, when what we are determined to do is break free from overly prescriptive and demanding international obligations and re-assert control over our fish and shellfish stocks. That is what sovereignty means.
● Bertie Armstrong is chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation