The Fish and Fin

[HateIsNotGood]

Welcome to The Fish and Fin - a thread dedicated to the current Brexit negotiations that pit Fishing and Finance against each other...

I have created a Premises Sign - the premises have many different rooms - a structure where variations of debates can be undertaken.

I will next post the Room Names - such as Artists Corner (memes, etc), History Channel (for all the older info that has gone before), The Ring ( for 1:1 debates) The Library etc.

My own support is for Fishing, basically because we are an Island surrounded on all sides by Sea - fish is a very important commodity for the UK.

Yes it currently is a very insignificant % of GDP but does that make it insignificant - from a socio-economic perspective, from the many deprived coastal communities affected by many things, including fishing. Isn't it best to focus some attention on what can be achieved for these communities with the resources that are already available, rather than those that might be.

Sustainability and Environmental Protection - very, very important and more easily managed if the majority of fish caught were landed at UK Ports.

Yeah but who sold or their Quota then? - I'm sure there's many that regret doing so, in retrospect. However, given Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions - given the choice of sending more Fathers and Sons out to their possible deaths or we 'could cash out now lads' - I couldn't be sure what choice I'd make.

Anyway, I'll post my Thread Structure Idea next.

Having now read the article, I see it's the lack of immigrant workers that he is complaining about, so he could actually be any business relying on cheap labour, not fish.

Thanks for your input peregrina.

However, I do think that decisions made 40+ years ago should in the main be consigned to the History Channel. I don't think interrogating the decisions and reasons for them of the Boat Owners of 40 or 30 years ago is very helpful to finding agreements in the year 2020.

And yes we do need to encourage New Starters as a priority. As well as encouraging UK-markets to buy/cook/eat our local catches; which obviously isn't entirely inedible as there's a 'market' for it.

Parallel to this - it is the truth that the majority of the current UK Catch is currently landed and processed in Scotland.

Well, maybe it's time for landing and processing those UK Catches further down the Coast too - therefore reducing the need for centralizing labour/worker requirements into a very small geographical area.

How would you encourage new entrants? you can't just take a boat out to sea, takes years to build up suitable experience and even then, deep sea fishing is extremely dangerous and not a reliable way to make money, i can just about remember the regular boat losses in the 70s.

EU boat owners cannot be forcibly made to hand back quota, legally bought can they?
How will areas that have decent employment feel about factories closing and relocated to England? has england the staff?

Agreements all have to be sought as fish move around, no point UK limiting mackrell catches in the channel if france doesn't in the Bay of Biscay.
Good trying to change peoples eating tastes, chefs have been trying to do that for years with little success.

For me, as fish stocks are declining, the emphasis should be conservation, not moving the amounts caught between countries.

Hartels - I was thinking exactly the same thing about moving fish processing further south when I read the article. I'm pretty sure the likes of Hull and Grimsby would have more local people likely to take up the jobs than in the Aberdeen/Peterhead area. Living near a Scottish fishing port I have to say that a lot of the workers on the boats there are from far eastern countries. I don't know how that works. Perhaps they get round it by registering the boats in another country.

I think chefs could change people's tastes - who, 30 years ago would have dreamt that people would eat sushi in this country?

Registering boats in another country - a different issue to leaving the EU, but hasn't the registering of ships in e.g.Liberia and not the UK been going on for years? I think it gets round UK employment legislation for one thing.

As for workers being from the Far East (or on Spanish boats from Latin America), I imagine that this is like the coal mining industry was - few UK people wanted their sons to go down the pit if something less dangerous was on offer, so it could well be the same for deep sea fishing - but that's just a supposition of mine.

Sushi is not really mainstream, chefs have been trying to get people to buy Coley or Hake with limited success, we seem to be wedded to Cod and Haddock, shell fish is even less popular.

I can buy a kilo of chicken for around 1/4 to 1/2 the price of the cheapest fish, as i said, its not a sustainable food supply, unless its farmed, there are a few environmental issues with that and its expensive.

Perhaps the Gov. might need to subsidise the likes of Coley and Hake and get it introduced into chippies as a cheaper alternative so people become accustomed to it and acquire a taste for it. They could also encourage the premade meals industry to produce dishes with these and more shell fish in.

Coley is wonderful - but the flesh is grey so people will not eat it non processed.
Hake is massively underrated
Personally I'm a massive fan of kippers and mackerel
I also like sushi but am the only one in my family.
One of the big seafood harvests in the UK is bivalves - remember the Chinese cockle pickers
but Brits do not even eat mussels regularly

Hake is easy to rebrand as Merluza and remind people of their Spanish holidays

Of the 12,000 tonnes of hake landed into the UK last year, just 1.5 per cent was consumed in the UK

So if it were all consumed in the UK... exactly how far would it go around 66m people..... everyone would have about 150 grams per year.

Its not going to close down the factory chicken industry is it.

It's funny how 'tastes' change (or are manipulated to suit the markets) - I remember when Chicken was a luxury and my Grandma poached Coley for the cat.

Sustainable fishing, at the very least within UK Waters, will be more easily managed if the fish caught in UK Waters is mostly 'landed' at UK Ports - but it isn't, under the current CFP, a lot of it is caught by non-UK Boats and Landed at non-UK Ports.

Anyway lots of good ideas here.

But again, ask yourself why it's caught by non-UK boats.

And what is the point of landing stuff in UK waters if there is no market for it.
Why not get it to the end user as quickly a possible?

Pere - already asked myself that Q - and the A is because of the quota allocation under CFP. And yes, I do consider the UK quota and boat owners that sold their quota and boats all those years ago - and I think that it was a very understandable reaction to working in one of the most dangerous industries in the world. I refered to this early on and so too did one of the articles posted by either jas or myself.

My current solution would be - don't catch it if there's no 'market' for it; unless it compromises eco-systems.

However, if it's edible, and within sustainable limits, then there will always be a market here for cheap, nutritious, fresh food.

It can also be processed and exported to other markets or maybe donated to 'starving' regions of the world.

Netted fish will never ever be "cheap" certainly not in the way pork or chicken is.
Out of interest, when was chicken a luxury? that must be 50s or 60s? earlier?

Chicken was definitely a luxury in the 1950s.

I think most things were back then! but thats brexit isn't it? always looking back to a mythical Golden age.

I can remember staring in wonder as a child at the ultimate Sunday tea extravagance, the tin of salmon.

Attitudes to food were different. The generation that had known rationing would not waste a scrap. Today we throw away about a third of what we buy. A lot of that is stalks and peel, but plenty of it isn't. This is particularly true of those hypnotised by sell-by dates who will bin entire joints of meat that look absolutely fine becase of the magic number.

Boiled ham for Friday's tea was our treat.

It wasn't so much that we didn't waste food, there just wasn't much around. There certainly wasn't much variety.

Some things were better then - there was a commitment to the NHS by all political parties.

Chicken still a luxury in the 70s - as in a whole one from the butchers roasted on a Sunday and the basis of two more days of family evening meals - I still use my Grandma's Pans for creating the Stock for the 3rd Day Stew and they still work as well as the newer Pans my Mother gave me a few years ago.

Seems that Fishing is still A Big Issue in the Brexit Negotiations. Just musing on the point that the EU wants the same access to UK waters as they do now, and after all, The Seas do belong to The Planet really, so they may have a point.

So, following on from that train of thought, then the UK can just go over to the Continent and start digging up coal, or building wind farms to take their wind, etc as it all belongs to The Planet really.

Can't see that working out too well. The UK is surrounded by sea, it's the main natural resource we have - we don't have the landmasses and the other natural resources that some other EU countries have. No matter where you live in the UK you aren't very far from the Sea.

We'll just have to wait and see/sea,sea how it goes for now.

But the point with the UKs fishing waters is that British people do not want to eat what is caught
so it makes more sense to have it caught by people who DO want to eat it

Well LQ, at the mo we'll have to agree to disagree on that for now, my view is that the UK population will find UK-water caught catches as tasty as anyone else does, given a push and a shove and a recipe or two.

The Sea doesn't just produce food, but a source of sustainable power too - just like mountains and rivers do, it's just that the UK, whilst having a lot of rivers and a few mountains has lots and lots of sea.

my view is that the UK population will find UK-water caught catches as tasty as anyone else does, given a push and a shove and a recipe or two.
Do you like razor clams?
Brits have not eaten razor clams for decades - LONG before the EU

Well I don't know LQ as I've not eaten Razor Clams before (but find their shells a lot) and a quick googley shows their quite edible so I'd make a chowder with them.

There's a fair bit of edible fish in UK waters, I'd rather it was caught sustainably and that's best controlled by the UK I think.

Anyway, seems a virus is putting paid to the 'supply-chain', globalized purchasing of tat via slave labour and environmental pollution version of economics/trade. Ne'er mind The Brexit...

So, maybe more than the Brits might need to start liking Razor Clam Chowder and other such locally-sourced dishes.

If you can get razors they are REALLY yummy - steamed in garlic butter like a long thin quahog
serve with chilled white wine a salad and fresh bread