EU quotas Sink Britain's Small Fishing Boats
by Christopher Booker

All round the southern coast of England, fishermen are holding angry meetings to discuss the greatest crisis that has yet confronted them in the 34 years since Edward Heath signed away control of Britain's fishing waters to Brussels. Although this has already led to the disappearance of more than half our fishing fleet, once the biggest in Europe, the full scale of this disaster has been obscured by the fact that 5,000 smaller fishing boats have survived. In dozens of small ports and fishing villages there are still enough small "inshore" vessels to give the impression that we still have a fishing industry.

Now, however, thanks to new rules introduced under the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, it is these small fishermen whose survival is threatened because, with nine months of 2007 still to run, they have already caught most of the cod and other species they are legally permitted to land.

Mature cod are, in fact, abundant this year around southern England. In the Channel and the Thames estuary, our fishermen watch their French and other continental counterparts catching as many fish as they wish. But if the English boats exceed their new yearly catch limits, they face criminal prosecution, hefty fines and the possible loss of their fishing licences.

Figures obtained from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) by Sheryll Murray, a fisherman's wife from Looe who is prospective Conservative candidate for South-East Cornwall, show that, barely three months into the year, our small local fishermen have already landed 102 per cent of their cod allocation for Area V11 including most of the Channel. This means that any further cod they catch over the next nine months - and cod are so plentiful that huge numbers will end up in their nets - must be thrown dead back into the sea.

Only last month even Joe Borg, of Malta, the European fisheries commissioner, described this policy, made inevitable by the EU's quota system, as "morally wrong". He admitted that, under the CFP rules, 880,000 tons of fish are having to be dumped each year in the North Sea alone, and that in some waters around the British Isles, more than 90 per cent of all the fish caught are having to be discarded (compared with an average in Norwegian and Icelandic waters of only 4 per cent).

But the blame for the disaster confronting Britain's inshore fishermen lies as much with our own ministers and officials as with the CFP itself. It is bad enough, for instance, that Brussels has allocated 73 per cent of the cod quota in the English Channel to France, only 8 per cent to Britain. But what makes it worse is that Defra has allocated less than a third of this quota to 315 smaller fishing vessels between Cornwall and Essex, while the rest goes to just 24 larger boats, many of which do not even catch all their quota.

Now that our fisheries minister, Ben Bradshaw, has, at the behest of Brussels, introduced much tighter checks on how many fish are actually caught, it has become obvious that the allocations given to the "under 10-metre" fishermen are nothing like enough to give them a living (while forcing them to throw away most of the fish they catch). So grave is the crisis now threatening our small fishermen that, on Friday, some of them met the main fishermen's mission, a Christian charity, to see whether emergency aid could be arranged to support scores of fishermen and their families when their money runs out.

A recent packed meeting in east London of fishermen from Kent and Essex concluded that many of them will not survive. At least at the last election, as Mrs Murray points out, our fishermen could pin some faint hope on her party's pledge that it would defy Brussels by introducing a new management system for British waters, based on the modern techniques by which other North Atlantic countries have shown that it is possible for both fishermen and fish stocks to thrive. But since that policy was abandoned, our fishermen now have little to hope for other than charitable handouts - leaving the fish around our shores to our continental partners.
The Sunday Telegraph, 11th March 2007