Post brexit fishing

[Spinflight]

I hope everyone can applaud the government's decision to scrap the London convention on fishing.

It was a pre EEC bribe, particularly to the French, who had a habit of vetoing our membership back in the 1960s.

Their action also gives some confidence that we can return some prosperity to our much neglected coastal regions. All those lovely fishing villages so beloved of rich Londoners, oddly enough, are there in the first place because people made a good living from the sea.

As of course they still do elsewhere in Europe. If you doubt this then go on holiday to Galicia in Northern Spain. Wonderfully leafy and prosperous with some of the best cuisine I've ever sampled on the planet. A single port, Vigo, lands more fish per year than all the ports in the UK and Northern Ireland combined.

Vigo too is where factory ships were invented. And still where most are built. I've toured the yards and the harbour and the seried ranks of very large trawlers are an impressive sight. Even more so when you consider that most trawlers of their type will spend 300 days a year at sea.

Many of these factory ships indeed are so large and 'efficient' that they are registered under different names in every EU country with enough quota to use up. They suck their quota limit in a matter of weeks out of our waters, then move on to Ireland's, and eventually to whichever impoverished or corrupt country is daft enough to allow their sea creatures to be vacuumed up indiscriminately for a fee. Somalia and Ethiopia made this mistake, their fishermen left without fish and only piracy to revert to.

Spain might be the worst offender, why wouldn't they be when the EU body which allocates quotas is based in Galicia and staffed mainly by Galicians. It does though have some history.

The Dutch fleet on the other hand only historically has a small sliver of the English Channel to call its own. Quite why we've allowed five of the largest fishing vessels ever built to hoover up a third of our quota in addition to their own is sheer madness.

One of these vessels alone managed to fish the Mauritanian coast dry, yet we currently allow many of them to operate off our own coasts.

So whether you are a remainer, leaver, Londoner or inland let's all agree that brexit can have nothing but a positive effect on our coasts and communities so long as we take back control and ban these modern monstrosities from ever dropping a net around our coasts again.

As a remainer i do hope that uk fishing will be one of the industries that really does benefit from brexit.

Yes I'm applauding and very happy

Who will we sell all this fish to?

It's a worry, washing. There needs to be a huge marketing campaign to get us all to eat British coastal fish.

I'm another remained that thinks the EU got fishing badly wrong. So there one silver lining about the Brexit cloud.

We currently import several billions worth of (our own) fish every year washing.

Huge and growing market worldwide, selling it all is the least of our worries. :)

Or more properly keeping our current quotas for genuine UK businesses roughly similar so that the ravaged fish stocks can recover for a couple of years first and then limiting the maximum size of any vessels used should do the trick nicely.

All of the very large vessels which are supposedly UK flagged are also flagged elsewhere so their greed will work nicely against them. :)

I sort of hope it doesn't lead to a resurgent British fishing industry. We can't feed everyone with native fish and if we try we will run the risk of driving our fish to scarcity. I would rather we cut back. On a practical note given that we already don't have so many fisherman I feel like allowing access in exchange for a better deal is a valuable bargaining chip, as it was in the 60s, and it will probably end up being given back exchange for something.

So very pleased about this, makes me very happy. I agree OP, always thought that system was madness. I'm a leave voter btw.

I think it's a brilliant move - providing they stick to firm fishing quotas to preserve and maintain stock.

75% of the British catch is exported, mostly to the Eu. Who is going to buy it?

Not exported misti, 77% or higher isn't actually landed in the UK at all. Even purely British flagged and operated trawlers might head for Iceland or elsewhere if they can get a better price.

In actual fact we net import fish, several billions worth a year.

As for the marketplace for fish it has never been weak and prices are rising considerably, especially since the Chinese appetite for protein has taken off.

As an example the port of Vigo does about ten percent of its business in squid. Most of this comes from the Falklands. Why Vigo when the Falklands are thousands of miles away?

It's simply because that is one of the ports whose infrastructure, auctions and industry are set up to process squid, and the Spanish do rather like their calamari. The Falklands simply don't have the capability to process hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year.

Because the fish themselves have been landed outside the UK increasingly for a couple of generations the industry has followed the fish. Your Findus fish fingers start life in the north sea, are landed probably in Boulogne-sur-Mer, are bought at auction by Findus, are trucked to the factory, are turned into fish fingers etc, are then marketed and shipped to supermarkets all over Europe and the world including being imported into the UK.

Come brexit and the end of London convention fishing rights Findus and many other companies (I've seen figures suggesting there's over 7000 companies focused on export in Spain alone) will have to decide whether to move or pay to import fish from us.

I grew up eating fish landed at the local harbour and caught in local waters. The sooner I can return to that the better. I am in Scotland where the vast majority of the remaining UK fleet is based. Even the Remainiac SNP are happy about this.