Bass ban could be EU’s dottiest diktat ever
Back in the Nineties I regularly reported in this column on the disaster being created by an avalanche of new EU and homegrown regulations, so ill-designed but zealously enforced that I described them as “taking a sledgehammer to miss the nut”. Yet another example was a decision taken by EU fisheries ministers (including our own George “Useless” Eustice) on December 13.
So fashionable has it recently become to eat sea-bass that there has been massive overfishing for this species around our shores by large foreign-owned trawlers. The EU’s response has been to make it a criminal offence, as from yesterday, for our hundreds of thousands of recreational sea-anglers to catch even a single bass.
But each of the big trawlers is still permitted to catch 1.3 tonnes a month – far more in all than were ever caught by anglers using rod and line (such as that keen fisherman Nigel Farage, who drew this insanity to everyone’s attention). Even this, however, will force the commercial fishermen to throw large quantities of bass caught in their nets dead back into the sea, to avoid exceeding their new limit.
So the result of the policy will be, on one hand, to deprive the small anglers of a right enjoyed since Magna Carta, to catch a few fish they intend to eat. On the other it will create yet another ecological catastrophe. A perfect example, we might say, of taking “a sledgehammer to miss the nut”.