Brexit talks will show why a better deal for UK fisheries is not on the menu

Fishermen are famous for exaggerating the size of their catch. “You should have seen the one that got away,” they boast. Well, Brexit has turned this into an art form.

Looking ahead to negotiations on a new UK-EU fisheries deal, Peter Aldous, Tory MP for Suffolk, told the Today programme earlier this month that Brexit would mean a bonanza for UK fishermen. "We’d see a sevenfold increase” in what could be caught “by UK vessels in the south and north sea," he said.

After years of decline, the UK’s fisheries industry is tiny, accounting for 0.12 per cent of UK GDP. The automotive industry by contrast accounts for 4 per cent. Even something like heritage tourism accounts for 1.1 per cent.

And yet fishermen enjoy undeniably strong support from a public that admires a group that does a very dangerous job in extreme conditions. Actually, fishing isn’t in the top ten of the UK’s most dangerous professions—but the risks are undeniable. 

Indeed, the hard Brexit camp has exploited public sympathy for the UK's fishing industry and uses the sector as the poster child for the injustices of EU membership. Perhaps the best example of this myth-based PR came during the referendum campaign, when Ukip leader Nigel Farage stood at the head of a small flotilla of trawlers to call for the UK to “take back control” of its fisheries. He told TV cameras that the UK fishing industry was “literally being destroyed as a result of EU membership.” 

Now, with talks turning to the future deal with Europe, fisheries are back in the national conversation. But are the EU and its Common Fisheries Policy really to blame for the state of the UK’s fishing industry? And will the negotiations due to start soon undo some of the past injustices of EU membership? 

The UK got a raw deal on fisheries when it joined the then European Economic Community in 1973. Just as the UK was finalising negotiations on entry to the EEC, the six founding members reached a deal on sharing access to waters. The UK, along with Ireland and Denmark, has long coastlines and rich waters so was ripe for the plundering. This access has been fixed in an annual round of quota setting under the Common Fisheries Policy. But there is no reason to expect Brexit will help things.

For UK fishermen to increase their quota sevenfold after Brexit would mean other EU countries handing over some of their quota to the UK. Yet other EU countries have made it clear that their goal in the negotiations is to maintain the current amount of fish they catch in UK waters. French President Emmanuel Macron said he expected his compatriot Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator on Brexit, to deal “in cold blood” when it came to fisheries. 

In fact, many on the EU side think the UK will have to give away even more fish in order to maintain access to EU markets for the country's financial services sector.

Phil Hogan, the Irish politician who is now the European Commission's trade chief, told the Irish Independent: “There certainly will be trade-offs, particularly at the end of the negotiations. The EU will be seeking concessions on fishery access and the UK will very probably be seeking concessions on financial services.” 

So instead of increasing their quotas several fold, UK fisherman could be forced to make sacrifices to maintain the lifestyles of the UK’s bankers and fund managers. It hardly seems fair, does it?

In truth however, it is not Europe but successive UK governments which have added to the industry's problems. 

It is a little-known secret but one of the reasons why foreign fishermen have the right to exploit UK waters is because UK law allows fishermen to sell their quota rights to the highest bidder. It is the only EU member state that permits this.

As a result, a large share of quotas that used to belong to UK fishermen is now owned and exploited by French, Dutch and Spanish vessel owners. 

If pro-Brexit politicians really wanted to ensure that UK fishermen had a better deal in the form of a larger share of UK quotas, they should have fought for it to be illegal to sell fishing rights.

Coming back to the negotiations, there is another reason why the UK will have to accept a trade-off between giving EU fishermen access to UK waters and access to lucrative EU markets for UK-caught fish. A large part of what UK fishing vessels catch is high-value seafood like crabs and Dublin Bay prawns (or langoustines and nephrops to give them their technical name) that find a ready market on French and Spanish dining tables. UK consumers, who eat much less fish than the French and Spanish, don’t like the high-value fish so much, preferring instead white fish like cod which comes from places like Norway.

So the EU will bargain hard in the negotiations to continue catching as much fish in UK waters as it does at the moment, and possibly more. The UK will have to agree because its fishing businesses want to keep on selling to the EU market.

Soon fishermen will be talking about the one that really got away: any chance of taking back control of UK fisheries. But then that was always a red herring.