I regularly go on holiday with my family in Mevagissey, a fishing village in Cornwall. Some try to calculate how much of the local economy is dependent on tourism and how much from the fishing industry. But the dividing line isn’t straightforward. Part of the attraction for the tourists is that its tradition as a working fishing village continues. The fishermen often have second jobs taking the holiday makers on boat trips or running restaurants, serving fish for lunch that they caught that morning.
Some of them will sing on the harbour on Monday evenings as part of the Mevagissey Male Voice Choir. While there certainly is a housing shortage, the claims of hostility towards tourists are much exaggerated. There is some badinage in the pubs but it is pretty good-natured.
There is some political relevance to these anecdotes. The Labour Government has just traded the livelihoods of our fishermen as a negotiating chip for a ‘reset’ with the European Union. Emmanuel Igwe has already detailed for this site what a terrible deal this will be. But after decades of EU membership, our fishing industry is already much diminished.
Thus, there is the cynical calculation that there are only around 10,000 British fishermen still working, few of whom will have been Labour voters anyway. They are considered expendable. What Labour forget is the emotional connection of the British people with the fishing industry, which is much more widespread. Ten thousand fishermen – but ten million of us go on holiday to Devon and Cornwall each year.
The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations says:
Giving the EU twelve years of guaranteed access to UK waters up to the six-mile inshore limit gives away the best card that we still had in our hand in fisheries discussions with Europe. This surrenders the best prospect that the fishing industry and coastal communities had for growth over the coming decade. We had reason to believe that our government understood the economic, symbolic and conservation value of reclaiming exclusive access for UK boats to our territorial waters within 12 miles of the coast. Clearly, however, they did not value such things as much as their European counterparts.
All is not lost. Both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage stress they are fishermen’s friends. They have both pledged to withdraw from this miserable deal if and when there is a change of government. ‘We are now in a worse position than the Faroe Islands – a set of islands with the population of Scarborough, but which gets to have annual negotiations,’ declared Badenoch in Parliament.
Some grimly warn there may not be much of the industry left in four years time. Each year, more retire. What prospects do their children see in following them in such a challenging and uncertain career?
To see the industry not only survive but recover we need to do more than reclaim our fishing waters. We must also abolish an appalling quango called the Marine Management Organisation, which has left fishermen exasperated with its perverse bureaucratic demands.
A couple of years ago, I spoke to a fisherman in Mevagissey who said box-ticking regulations from the MMO for boat inspections were more onerous and absurd than ever. He said those who’ve been fishing for 30 years were being ordered around by jobsworth young officials with a lack of common sense. It wasn’t just about the time and expense of compliance. Something of the pride and independence of having your own boat had gone. So he had decided to quit, and when I returned, he had.
Perhaps he was unfair to the young inspectors, who were, as the saying goes, ‘only doing their job’. They did not decide on the regulations. The Government did. Though, as so often when decisions are handed to quangos, the politicians too would no doubt shrug and say it was a matter for the MMO. While we were in the EU, there was the valid excuse that however absurd the rules might be they were a EU requirement. Yet now we are independent they have not only been retained but added to.
An unsuccessful legal challenge was launched against MMO regulations in 2022. It said: ‘The new rule via a fishing license condition requires fishermen to estimate within a margin of tolerance of 10% the weight of their catches when they land.’ The complaint argued that ‘it is impossible to consistently estimate and guess the weight of catches, accurately’, pointing out that government data showed that 40% of estimated landing data for larger boats was outside the 10% margin of tolerance, and that it could be wrong by as much as 116%. Naturally, EU boats, licensed by the UK government to fish in UK waters, were exempt.
Not that the MMO is the only culprit. There is the Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), Natural England, DEFRA, local authorities, duplicate branches of the big state summoning fishermen to meetings, imposing new demands for the cause of ‘modernisation’.
Chris Loder, when he was the MP for West Dorset which includes Lyme Regis, said:
Fishermen report endless consultations, meetings and additional burdens, such as the catch app, I-VMS, new MCA inspections and so on. Those burdens can and need to be addressed. In West Dorset, we are finding the MCA a bureaucratic nightmare.
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It holds our fishermen to account against its own questionable or false advice. That is increasingly becoming a problem. I hope that I can count on the Minister’s support to help with some particularly difficult issues in my constituency. Fatigue in the sector is considerable. The sheer scale of bureaucracy is causing real mental health concerns.
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Our fishermen do not work nine to five, so the MMO, the IFCAs and officials in the Minister’s Department can and should do more to make things easier for them.
Derek Thomas, when he was the MP for St Ives, demanded that Department for Transport inspections should be ‘consistent, coherent and recognise both the enormous knowledge that inshore fishermen have and their years and years of experience of how to keep safe at sea’.
Well done to Loder and Thomas for raising these points. But, of course, they were ignored and duly lost their seats.
Just suppose we had a government, in a few years, which treated fishermen fairly. Would it all be too late? I don’t think so. There may be some benefit from the reset in less vexatious bureaucracy being imposed by the EU on our fish exports to them. Then we have news of the ‘Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund’. As so often, the Government imposes burdens and then seeks to offset the harm by handing out subsidies – an ever more complicated and inefficient way to proceed, but it might keep the industry struggling on for a bit longer.
Governments can be forgiven for quite a lot. But not being unpatriotic. Selling out our fishermen is such a profound betrayal of our history and our national interests that the angry response is of no surprise. Let’s channel that anger into resolving to give future generations of fishermen the freedom to thrive.
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