Our fishing industry deserves better than this

The Conservatives had over 6 years to prepare the fishing industry for this. But they’ve left our fishermen with a monumental headache.

They were keen to jump on the bandwagon when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall led the successful campaign against the hundreds of thousands of tons of dead fish which are discarded each year as an unintended by-catch in a mixed fishery. But they have not prepared the systems nor helped the fishing industry get ready for this.

I queried this at the time – how they would distinguish between intended and unintended by-catch, how they would protect the vast majority of fishermen who want to fish sustainably, how they would ensure the landings wouldn’t be to the detriment of marketable stock and what they would do with the surpluses.

Of course the BBC calls these “New EU” fishing rules. (Part of their pro-Brexit slant) But these rules emanated from and were championed by the UK! The UK rightly wanted to make sure that all other EU fishing nations adopted these rules, so the UK didn’t have to adopt them unilaterally!

(That irony seems again to have been lost on our quaintly breathless and credulous media pack…)

Fishing: New EU rules could have ‘grave’ impact on UK industry