The sound of silence

The great fishing disaster rolls on ... recorded each passing year.

This year Scottish fisheries secretary Richard Lochhead estimates that, during 2007, whitefish worth £60 million was discarded in the North Sea – by the British fleet. "When other European fleets are taken into account the problem is compounded greatly," he says, then adding: "It is an utter disgrace that our fishermen are being forced to dump high quality and marketable fish back into the sea - hundreds of millions of pounds wasted and unnecessary pressure on our stocks due to the crazy rules of the CFP."

And the Tory policy on the CFP is? We know what it was, but that was before the great eurosceptic Dave intervened. All we hear now is the sound of silence.

COMMENT THREAD

Open Letter to the Taxpayers' Alliance

Dear officers and researchers of the Taxpayers' Alliance,

It does not make me at all happy to have to write this letter. I have been a vocal and admiring supporter of your organization since its inception and have even blogged about its work, here and here.

The boss, on the other hand, has attacked you on a number of occasions and accused you of not really understanding the EU and its ramifications. I know you don't like those attacks and I don't blame you. When the boss goes into battle fur flies. I also know that in private conversation many of you say that, of course, you do understand that VAT is an EU tax and campaigning against one bit of it is a waste of time but it is a good thing to get people worked up about one issue so they can progress to others. Somehow the second half of it never happens but that's politics.

So, let's move on to recent developments. A little while ago you announced that together with Global Vision you were intending to raise the issue of "Europe" in the run-up to the elections in June. An admirable thing to do though the first effort of that campaign, another poll that showed most of those asked wanting "a loosening of ties with the EU", was, as the boss explained an example of fudging the issue. To put it bluntly, it ain't on offer.

Changing the terms of our membership requires a re-writing of the treaties and that requires an IGC, which has to reach a unanimous agreement. To reach that we have to offer something in return for that ill-defined looser membership. I doubt if the people asked in that poll know this and I am reasonably sure that they were not told by the pollsters.

Ah but it raises their consciousness (to use a Marxist term). Perhaps, but to use false arguments achieves nothing and puts the cause in jeopardy. If the other side lies and we lie, why should people choose our lies over theirs?

So we come to your latest effort in matters European – campaigning about the CFP. I welcome everyone who joins the anti-CFP campaign. All of us, veterans of the fight, do so. As it happens I couldn't get to your demo outside the European Parliament building in Queen Anne's Gate (why the European Parliament of all the institutions?) but it looked jolly. Maybe I should have gone for the t-shirt – my very old Save Britain's Fish shirt has finally given up the ghost.

You have also produced a report on the sorry state of affairs in the fishing industry, one that was mentioned in various media outlets. I recall previous reports being mentioned in the very same outlets and the same shock-horror tone being adopted. But, actually, I must be wrong. Because this is, according to your blurb, the first full report on the Common Fisheries Policy and the effect it has had on the industry and the state of the fish supply.

Now this puzzled me. Because I recall doing many research papers and briefings on the subject, some of which included figures; I recall attending a huge rally of fishermen in Central Hall many years ago; taking part in numerous, packed-to-the-rafts fringe meetings at party conferences at which the speakers produced much information and many figures; being a speaker in debates on the subject; reading well grounded and carefully calculated reports by Save Britain's Fish; questions and debates in both Houses of Parliament. Clearly, none of this happened; nobody did any research and nobody managed to produce any figures before. I began to wonder whether I existed at all.

So I spoke to one or two people and was assured that yes, I did exist and yes, all those events did take place. There were research papers and meetings and debates; there was a carefully constructed policy paper by Owen Paterson, which had a good deal of input from the boss and which, unlike your own rather cautious report, actually offered alternative ideas (much debated by fishermen and their organizations); and yes, there was this book called The Great Deception that had a good deal about the CFP in it; and let's not even mention the many articles by Christopher Booker and postings on EUReferendum (far, far too many to link to but is easy enough to do through the search engine and just to whet your appetite, here is one).

I even telephoned Tom Hay the founder and first chairman of the Fishermen's Association Ltd up in Peterhead (where there is no snow). Yes, apparently he exists as well and remains a source of much information on the subject.

The point is not that you produce figures of your own (which seem a little thinly sourced, by the way) or that you give your own account of how the policy developed (which appears to leave certain crucial events out) but that you do not acknowledge those who had done the work before you. Acknowledging other people's work is not only courteous but sensible from your point of view: it looks better if your research can quote other sources.

I cannot help feeling that the campaign to raise awareness of Europe is a way of making the Conservative Party seem to be the real eurosceptic party for the European election in June. That, I suspect, is why you want to "own" the topic while making sure that discussion does not outrun the party's policy. Of course, I may be wrong but the timing, the refusal to refer to anyone before you and the timidity of the actual proposals (as well as the vagueness of the facts) all point in that direction.

It cannot have pleased you that the Boy-King of the Conservative Party decided to bring Ken Clarke back to the front bench (though in a surprisingly lowly position for someone who was once Chancellor of the Exchequer). That move has undercut all attempts to replace UKIP with the Conservative Party as the eurosceptics' preferred choice.

So, here is what I suggest. I shall not call on you to stick with subjects you deal with so supremely well – the public sector in this country, its bloated officials and the waste that goes with it. After all, if you do that, you may avoid Scylla but will hit Charybdis. It will be pointed out to you that a good deal of the expense you talk about is imposed on local councils by the EU and cannot be avoided. That, of course, does not apply to the fat-cat salaries and those non-jobs you write about.

My idea is that you continue the sterling work you have been doing on the public sector. Keep drumming it into people's minds that it is bloated, wasteful and useless; that its employees do not do the work out of the goodness of their hearts but get high salaries and excellent perks at our expense; that high taxes is not the way forward and it is possible to cut them and to cut the bureaucracy that stifles us at the same time.

However, may I humbly suggest that when you get to "European matters" you stop pretending that you own the subject? Look around you. A good deal of work has been done and is being done. Use it and acknowledge it. That is the way forward. We are all happy to answer questions and to give information. But none of us like being told that we do not exist and have never existed.

Deal?

COMMENT THREAD

They get paid for this? (2)

Before we leave fishing, for the moment – clouded in our usual miasma of gloom and doom – we could not help but remark on the crass treatment of the issue by the Daily Mail today.

Under the by-line of Sean Poulter, Consumer Affairs Correspondent, we are told that the amount of cod that can be caught around Britain will be cut by between 14 and 20 percent next year. Most UK supplies come from around Iceland "where numbers are plentiful", burbles the egregious Poulter, but… "if fewer fish are trawled in the North Sea, prices will rise".

Now, let's see. According to this source, this one and especially this from the Frozen at Sea Fillets Association (FASFA), landings from British waters account for less than ten percent of cod consumed in the UK.

This was why the FASFA was set up - in September 2000 – representing trawler owners, importers and distributors of "Frozen at Sea Fillets" in the UK, Norway, Iceland, Faeroe Islands, UK, Russia, Germany, France and Spain. It works, "to actively counter current negative media coverage and reports about North Sea cod, which represents less than 10 percent of cod consumed in the UK."

In fact, according to the answer to a Parliamentary question posed by former shadow fisheries minister Owen Paterson:

Information available on landings of and trade in cod in 2002 indicates that landings by UK registered vessels accounted for 15 per cent. of total cod consumed in the UK during the year. However, most of the cod imported into the UK has been processed to some extent. As such on a standardised live weight equivalent basis, the landings by UK registered vessels accounted for 5 per cent. of total cod consumed in the UK in 2002.

This was publicised by the Booker column in February 2005 and, as far as we are aware, the situation has not changed.

So, if we lose 20 percent of five percent, that accounts for a one percent drop in cod landings – just supposing that the loss cannot be made up from the Faeroes, Norway and Iceland, "where numbers are plentiful".

But such does not percolate the dim little brain of Poulter, who continues to draw a handsome salary from the Mail. Of course, he could have earned it by asking why "numbers are plentiful" in Iceland, which has a healthy, expanding fishing industry (as the pictures show), while the British industry is falling apart.

However, this is the MSM we are talking about. To come up with a half-way intelligent explanation might actually require a little bit of work – and that would never do.

COMMENT THREAD

No hope, no hope at all

Every fibre of my body rebels at the thought of having to write a critique of the latest fisheries resolution to come out of Brussels. The illustration shows the sheer bulk of the crippling paperwork which no one fully understands and few read fully – with mistakes more common than not in the text.

And it is this paperwork which is killing the fishing industry. As I wrote last year, it is a cruel irony that the last formal EU ministers' meeting of the year is the fisheries council, at which the fate of fishermen throughout the EU – but especially in the UK – is decided for the coming year.

The cruelty comes, I wrote, because it is the time at which the crucial decisions on quotas for the coming year are made, under the Common Fisheries Policy – a policy which is not only morally but also technically bankrupt – invariably bringing woe to hard-pressed fishermen, just at a time when everyone else is preparing for the Christmas festivities

For as long as I can remember, each year I have been marking this ritual, the killing fields of the Brussels council chamber, where they participate in the slow, inexorable execution of the British fishing industry. And there comes a point where you simply cannot bear it any more.

One could, of course, prattle on like Charles Clover, who laments that "the fish always lose", a facile comment if ever there was. But then he gets paid to do it. In fact, it is all of us that lose, the whole nation, as we see an industry which could be worth £3 billion plus ground into oblivion, currently worth about half a billion and declining each year.

It says something at least that, as they take part in the destruction of an industry, two of the "colleagues" are cheerful. Shown here are Photis Photiou, minister of agriculture of Cyprus (left) and Hans-Christian Schmidt, Danish minister of agriculture. It says something that the agriculture minister of Cyprus has a say in the management of British waters, but the ultimate farce, or insult if you prefer, is below (left) – Joe Borg, the Maltese fisheries commissioner, the man in charge of British fishing.

You can pick your coverage – Google News has nearly 200 reports – from which this is a representative sample, here, here and here.

As the man from Scotland says, "it's another nail in the coffin", while that brainless fool Ross Finnie twitters - as he always does, every year – "I think it's the best deal there was available." If the "colleagues" stripped his shirt and underpants from him as he walked out of the Council chamber he would still say the same.

Of all the comments I have read, though, the one I prefer comes from the BBC website, citing Dr Bryce Beukers-Stewart, Fisheries Policy Officer for the Marine Conservation Society. He says:

It is astounding that the EU continues to persist with this doomed approach to fisheries management. These marginal adjustments to the quotas for cod around the UK have been going on for at least the last 20 years, but the fish stocks themselves are going down much faster. This is hardly surprising, as the quotas still allow for at least 60 percent of the fish to be removed each year - what chance does that give for recovery?

What is needed, he says, is a much more creative and proactive approach to improving the selectivity of fishing gear and practices to reduce the bycatch of unwanted or under-fire species such as cod.

Of course, there was such an approach proposed by the Conservative Party, which was gathering strength until the current leader junked the policy.

The light at the end of the tunnel is a huge express train, the letters “EU” emblazoned on it front, bearing down on us. There is no hope for the fishing industry, no hope at all. The picture above says it all: as the sun sets on the industry, the "Single European Fish" is now that much closer to reality.

Photos: Council of the European Communities.

COMMENT THREAD

End game

As some fish stocks in the British waters continue to decline, fisheries ministers are meeting in Brussels for the annual farce that goes under the name of quota allocation. They will emerge bleary-eyed this morning with another fudge that will drive stocks down further and fishermen closer to extinction.

The net result (no pun intended) really doesn't bear thinking about – it is so depressing. But three things can never be said too often. First, the preservation of stocks in a commercial fishery is a function of management. Second, the EU's Common Fisheries Policy is, primarily, a fisheries management system. Third, it has utterly and dismally failed. Even the EU's best friends will not deny that.

And, if the EU cannot get one of its longest-standing policies right, why should anyone have any confidence in anything else it does? That is the real significance of the CFP. Cameron was extremely unwise in ditching the Tory commitment to junk it. As the policy moves to the end game, with the almost total destruction of the British fishing industry, it will come back to haunt him, again and again.

Meanwhile, the picture shows two of the industry's executioners: Ben "dover" Bradshaw (with the pink scarf), the fisheries minister, and Ross Finnie, his useless Scottish clone. They are posing with idiots from the WWF, dressed as chefs for reasons best known to themselves, as they demand fishing ground closures and drastic catch cuts.

COMMENT THREAD