How the UK government can assert that fishing rights are one of the two main priorities is totally incredulous given that decades of mismanagement by successive British governments have hastened the decline of an already threatened industry before the UK even joined the EU.
The quota hoppers ( ie. Spanish Trawlers registered under a British flag) that joined the biggest English fleet in a cooperative pre 1970's was the beginning of decline. Then followed a UN convention which allowed a coastal state to extend its fishing zone to 200 miles.
By the mid 1970's Iceland seized upon the opportunity given by the 1970 UN convention and launched the cod wars to seize more fish in British and Irish territorial waters. The British government did nothing and compensated whole fleets to stay in port doing nothing.
Next came the Belgian & Dutch fleets who poached sole in the Irish Sea but again the British government didn't advise the UK fleets that this would affect their future quotas as it was later based on the size of catches historically made during this much earlier period.
As the number of fishing trawlers that were actually British owned shrank rather than just foreign owned but UK registered, the fishermen were abandoned and left out of work and forced to work in the gas and oil industry.
The fishermen were heavily compensated at the time but that was that. No government policy was rolled out at any time to increase their historical quotas by upping their catch and extending their fishing zones to match or compete with Spanish, Dutch and Belgian owned trawlers.
The result is that today as the UK government challenges the fishing quotas set by a common pool set by the EU for all member states, it is being totally disingenuous in arguing that the quotas set are unfair as its predecessors failed to ensure that that UK quotas were protected
Whilst the Spanish, Belgian and Dutch were ensuring that they had high catches recorded to protect their future quotas, the British government was sitting on its backside with no plan or priorities the protecting their own quotas or the livelihood of the UK fishermen.
Decades later right up to these current UK-EU negotiations this historical or backdated system of allocating quotas is still being used to determine the fishing rights of each coastal state. Does the UK really have a case to claim unfair treatment?
Back then in the 1970's it could have but today after decades of self-inflected decline of the UK fishing industry it clearly doesn't. So what's it really all about when we actually sell most of our demersal fish back to the EU anyway as we are mainly cod and haddock consumers?
It all rests on flag waving, a notion of sovereignty & dreams of past glory that will be revisited post-Brexit as they reinvent a deluded gunship diplomacy that will be worth it just to put the foreigner back in their rightful place, irrespective of the economic consequences!
As for their case under any legal dispute, it's much more complicated and going by evidence of the historically higher quotas created by foreign fleets when British fleets lay idle, the courts could easily come down on the side of the EU at huge compensation cost to the UK.
Is a deluded sense of sovereignty or freedom to inflict more pain on ourselves so fundamental to our case for Brexit that we are prepared to commit ourselves to becoming more economically and geographically isolated from the rest of Europe?
Does Brexit merit the cost of being declared a pariah state or deemed internationally as devoid of diplomacy or statescraft that we can't even make a trade deal with our nearest & biggest trading partner, the EU? It's time to face the reality of Brexit and get rid of the slogans.
Hi @threadreaderapp Please #unroll thanks
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