Former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and supporter of the Vote Leave campaign Owen Paterson has hit out at the British government’s plans for exiting the European Union, specifically commenting that the Prime MInister’s Chequers will prove to be fatal for British fishing.
‘It is not surprising that the decline of British fishing has come to symbolise the worst, most destructive consequences of our EU membership,’ he said.
‘The Common Fisheries Policy has been a biological, environmental, economic and social disaster, doomed to failure by its ludicrous attempt to manage a complex marine environment with arbitrary bureaucratic policies as inflexible as they are remote. As I highlighted as Shadow Fisheries Minister in 2005, national control is no panacea if we replicate the same failed policies in London instead of Brussels.’
He commented that the core failure is the CFP’s system of quotas for individual species which makes impossible demands on a mixed fishery, resulting inevitably in discards.
‘An EU discard ban is to be fully enforced as of 2019 but is proving unworkable. Discards are an inevitable symptom of the quota system and it is no use banning the symptom without tackling the root cause,’ he said.
‘Under such bans, when a vessel runs out of quota for one species it must stop fishing, even it if has adequate quota for others. This has potentially ruinous economic effects as vessels will be forced to tie up and return to port upon exhausting their smallest allocation.’
He advocates a move to refined effort control, with fishermen able to keep, land and record all catches in exchange for a limit on fishing time at sea.
‘To achieve any of this, the Government must act quickly. Yet the disastrous Chequers White Paper advocates a lengthy transition phase under European rules which would prove fatal. Under the transition proposals that must be implemented in full under ‘good faith’, the UK must obey all incoming EU laws, including the 2019 discard ban,’ Owen Paterson said.
‘The EU has every incentive to enforce this ban as international law (UNCLOS 62.2) says if a nation does not have the capacity to catch all its resources it must give the surplus to its neighbours. This is a very long way from the Government’s promise that the UK will be an independent coastal state, able to control access to its waters.’
According to Owen Paterson, Brexit provides ‘a wonderful opportunity to rebuild our fishing industry and improve our marine environment after years of neglect, but the timid proposals from Chequers fail to grasp it.’
‘Under the bold terms of a WTO deal, we can immediately abrogate the CFP and revert to international law, automatically retaking control over all water and resources within our Exclusive Economic Zone and negotiating with our neighbours on an equal footing from a position of strength.’
