We thought of it first

Joe Borg, the EU Fisheries Commissioner, has called for an end to "discards". Instead, we are told, he believes that fishermen should be limited by "effort". For example limiting the number of days vessels can spend at sea or where boats can fish. "Replacing quotas by effort can be a very effective way of reducing the environmental impact of fisheries, and in particular of discards," he says.

This has been picked up by the BBC which retails the Scottish Fishermen's Federation welcome for the idea, although SFF chief executive Bertie Armstrong also warns that simplifying issues may not solve them. "The consequences of using days at sea as the only control measure will require a great deal more thought. It is at best unpredictable and may, for some fisheries create more problems than it solves."

"Nevertheless," Armstrong adds, "it is an encouragement that the Commissioner is prepared to be truly radical and look at all options. We will, therefore, be asking him as a matter of urgency for more detail on what he is actually proposing."

Of course, if you want more detail of how a fisheries scheme could work, you need go no further that look at Owen Paterson's draft, dated January 2005, which we heralded on this blog. In pre-eminent position as one of our recommendations was: "Effort control based on 'days at sea' instead of fixed quotas," with much more detail of how that system could work.

Although then adopted by the Conservative Party as policy, it was quietly dropped when Cameron ascended to the throne and has been ignored even since by the Party. Now, nearly four years later, the EU commissioner is coming round to our way of thinking. But it also says a great deal that what was urgent those four years ago is still urgent, and the commission is still just talking about "reform".

At least, though, the commission is talking, which is more than is the Conservative Party, which has long since abandoned the fishing industry to its fate. Our Dave doesn't "do" Europe, which is why some of the campaigners who were once at the forefront of trying to get the Party to move on this issue have given up completely – and voted BNP at the last euro-elections.

But, in another five years time, perhaps, when the commission finally get down to offering formal proposals, to deal with what is left of the fishing industry, Dave can dust off Owen's paper and pretend it was his idea all along. We thought of it first, he can say, and all the little Tory boys can cheer at their good fortune at having such a far-seeing leader.

COMMENT THREAD

No shit Sherlock!

We've got it all wrong on fishing strategy, says EU – at least that is the "take" of The Times. It tells us that the EU commission is admitting that Europe's fishing industry is on the brink of suicide and several species are in danger of extinction after 25 years of policy failure.

Officials, we are then told, have admitted five key failings in the EU's Common Fisheries Policy as they prepared to tear up the idea of a centrally dictated strategy. They have launched the search for an alternative, saying that much of the responsibility for fishing must be returned to EU member states.

This would seem to contradict one of my immutable laws of government - that stupid institutions can never admit their own stupidity. However, not is all quite as it seems – there is more than a little spinning going on.

The EU Green Paper is far from as contrite as The Times would suggest. It starts off by claiming:

The EU Common Fisheries Policy has become streamlined and is now considerably cheaper and simpler to manage. Decision-making allows for specific technical decisions to be taken with closer involvement of fishers. Fishing operators are given incentives to behave responsibly but they are also expected to demonstrate that they comply with the basic principles of the CFP. Stakeholders fully participate in decisions and debates on policy implementation. Fisheries control has become far more effective.

The paper then goes on to offer a series of options, ostensibly for the better management of the Common Fisheries Policy, thereby ignoring the central and irredeemable defect of the policy – the very fact that it is a common policy. Furthermore, these are but proposals and there is a long way to go before any of them see the light of day – if at all.

Nevertheless, it is at least something that, after 25 years, the EU is recognising that one of its longest established policies has failed. It has yet to understand, however, the reason for that failure.

COMMENT THREAD

The stench of corruption

Whatever we have seen over the last week, it has not been politics. Instead, we have seen the spill-over of low-grade court gossip that preoccupies the prattling claque of courtiers, traded over the coffee tables of Portcullis House and the restaurants of Westminster to a ready and willing audience.

Such is the nature of court gossip that its purveyors are as low-grade and tacky as those who are currently the focus of the claque. Those of us with longer memories will recall the flood of highly descriptive tales of Gordon Brown's homosexuality, the graphic accounts of orgies in No 11, the "rent boys" in London hotels and his "sham" marriage to Sarah – merely a ploy to conceal from the public the dark side of the man who was to become our prime minister ... all delivered by bright little Tory Boys who vouched for the absolute truth of these lurid tales.

For politics, therefore, you will have to skate past the newspaper pages which bear the names of paid members of the court gossip-mongers and go to the Booker column.

There, you will find an account of how, last week, demonstrating French fishermen were also protesting at the shocking treatment of the two Northern Irish fishermen, Charlie McBride and his son Charles. These were the fishermen imprisoned a few weeks back for their pathetic efforts to pay off the crippling £385,000 fines imposed on them for falsifying their documentation in a bid to get round EU quotas.

This, of course, is the stuff of politics – the end result of the Common Fisheries Policy … note the word "policy", from which the word politics derives.

But while the French fishermen have an acute sense and understanding of the political issues that dominate their lives, you will not find a word of protest from the Westminster claque about the shameful treatment of the McBrides. You will get plenty of faux outrage about Damien Green but, in the Westminster village, they don't do politics any more – they just do soap opera.

It is a wonder therefore, that we even got to see a tiny voice of sanity in the letters column from Nigel Bowker of Banchory, Aberdeenshire. He declares that politicians "are deeply unpopular and it isn't just because of their unashamed looting of the public purse or the defamatory emails emanating from Number 10."

The last 12 years, he writes, have seen at least three political disasters: foreign policy, which we were promised would be ethical; economic policy, unless this is what an end to boom and bust looks like; and a lack of Opposition – the Conservatives have acted as loyal stooges to the Government in both of the other calamities.

And yet, by a peculiarity of our constitutional system, both of these failed parties know that one of them will form the next government because the barriers to competition are so high. No wonder so many people are disillusioned with our political system.

But if anyone is rash enough to expect change, they are wasting their time looking to the fourth estate for any guidance. There we have Iain Martin pontificating that Cameron's "first essential" in office will be to engineer a "quiet revolution in how Britain is governed".

We then see a trite list of marginal, cosmetic changes which will do nothing to address the deep-seated spiritual corruption of the political claque, reflecting the same fog of incomprehension that afflicts The Independent, with its equally lame proposals.

But then - in contrast with Americans, who at a remarkable level seem to have a very clear idea about the realities of power and how their government works - you will have to go a long way to find any similar level of understanding within the ranks of the political claque.

Just try to mention over the coffee tables of Portcullis House the tyranny of the Statutory Instrument. Try if you will to discuss how it has changed the face of government and irrevocably altered the relationship between Parliament and the executive and you will get the rolling of eyes and the subject rapidly changed.

But this is a culture that lionises the prattlers and revels in low-grade court gossip. It is a political culture in the final stages of infantalisation where serious analysis and attempts to understand the nature of power – and how it has been corrupted – have been consigned to the margins (and the ghetto of the Booker column).

This is a political culture in terminal decay, crowned by a miasma of prattle redolent of the haze of flies that surmounts a piece of rotting meat. Inevitably, though, those who exude the stench of spiritual corruption are themselves the last to be able smell it. But stench there is, and it is going to take more than a change of government to clear the air.

COMMENT THREAD

Caedite eos!

While our gaze is on distant lands, and we concern ourselves about peace, stability and the welfare of the population in Afghanistan, we have troubles here at home.

As Booker explains today, we are starting to see the end game that, before too long, is going to need the Army back here – to keep public order.

We now know, writes Booker, where the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, brought into being after Edward Heath gave away Britain's fishing waters in 1973, has ended up. The answer is in Walton Prison, Liverpool, a notoriously tough jail where two respected fishermen from Northern Ireland, Charlie McBride and his son Charles, are currently incarcerated.

Booker suggests that the story is "shocking", but it is much, much more than that. It is a travesty, an appalling example of how our ruling elites have become so oppressive and so all-powerful that they are no longer part of us, or represent us – but are indeed our oppressors.

The story (or at least, this part of it) starts in December 2007 when the two McBrides appeared in Liverpool Crown Court, having pleaded guilty earlier in the year to misidentifying catches of fish for which they had no quota under EU rules.

But instead of just asking for fines to be imposed on fishermen who break quota rules, the Marine Fisheries Agency (MFA) now has a new tactic. It calls in the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) to use the Proceeds of Crime Act, designed to recover money from international drugs traffickers, money launderers and other major criminals.

Soca – which last year replaced the Assets Recovery Agency, after it had spent £65 million to recover £23 million – assumes that if someone has benefited from the proceeds of crime for more than six months, he is living "a criminal lifestyle". Everything he owns can then be deemed to have derived from criminal activity.

In the case of Charlie and Charles McBride, all their assets were thus valued at more than £1 million, including their boat and homes (valued at the height of the property boom).

On this basis Judge Nigel Gilmour not only imposed on them fines of £385,000 – infinitely more than the value of the fish they had wrongly declared – but ruled that all their assets should be frozen as "proceeds of crime", even though the home and boat had been bought before the offences were committed. He also told the men that, unless they paid the fines within six months, they would go to prison for up to three years.

At their wits' end as to how to raise the money, the two McBrides negotiated a second mortgage on their homes. Charlie McBride presented Soca with £120,000, asking that it should be taken as a down-payment on the fine until he had somehow found the rest.

The agency asked how he had come by the money and, when told that it came from remortgaging his house, told him that he would be charged with contempt of court because the house was a "frozen asset".

Two weeks ago the two men were accordingly jailed for contempt, and having been allowed one telephone call to tell his wife Karen what had happened, Charlie is now serving out his sentence as a prison refuse collector.

So delighted is the MFA at discovering the Proceeds of Crime Act that it has used this sledgehammer tactic twice more in the past year. Three Thames fishermen were fined £317,000 for catching sole for which they had no quota. (Most of the UK sole quota had been given to foreign fishermen.)

In January the owners and skippers of six Newlyn boats were fined £188,000 for catching hake for which they had no quota (though hake were abundant). Among those fined were an 83-year-old widow, Doreen Hicks, and 82-year-old Donald Turtle and his wife Joan. They were found guilty by Judge Wassell because they were part owners of boats skippered by their sons.

In all these cases, the absurdly disproportionate fines have caused serious hardship; but the McBrides are the first fishermen who have been not only ruined but sent to jail, thanks to the ruthless war waged by the MFA. Concludes Booker:

When Mr Heath gave away Britain's fishing waters 36 years ago, his ministers lied to Parliament by pretending that we still retained control of our waters out to 12 miles. But even Mr Heath cannot have foreseen the day when, thanks to the zeal of British officials and judges, our fishermen would end up alongside violent criminals in a Liverpool prison.

That is Booker's conclusion. Others will (and have) drawn different conclusions. One of those is that, when the tumbrels do finally roll, a first class seat will have to be reserved for Judge Nigel Gilmour, who should be amongst the first to visit la Madame.

There does become a point in the history of any nation where those who govern no longer have the consent of those who are governed. That point passed some time ago, but it is the treatment of the likes of the McBrides which brings it home to us how far down that road we have travelled.

At the end of that road is civil disorder, anarchy and then war, as the people rise up and slaughter their oppressors. It may not happen in my lifetime. But, if it does I rather suspect that, if I am not actually part of the throng, I will be standing in the streets applauding as we rid ourselves of the incubus that has become our government and our ruling élite.

As for the innocent, the Crusader dictum will apply - Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

COMMENT THREAD

Race to the bottom

Irish fishermen are unhappy with the EU, according to the Irish Times, which is hardly surprising as they have fared almost as badly from the CFP as British fishermen.

What is really interesting though is the response from the Irish fisheries minister, Tony Killeen, which demonstrates quite how seriously the EU erodes national powers.

First though, the issue which is causing the ire of the fishermen is the EU's days-at-sea rule controlling the catches of the whitefish fleet which, it is claimed, unfairly penalise those who have fished less over the last decade.

The days at sea scheme, which rations the days fishermen are allowed to leave port, is being applied on the basis of recent track record, as a "conservation measure". But the problem is that those fishermen who co-operated with earlier conservation schemes and thereby fished less are now being awarded fewer days than those who did not.

At the moment, the scheme is being applied on a three-month trial basis along a limited section of the coast, principally affecting Donegal fishermen, and they are looking to the fisheries minister for relief from what is clearly an unfair anomaly.

And this is what makes Killeen's reaction interesting. He had discussions with the fishing federation at the weekend, when his response not to offer any amelioration but simply to argue that it could have been worse.

But for the government's action, he said, the scheme could have applied to the whole of the Celtic Sea. "The reality of EU fisheries councils is that you don't get everything you want. If we had refused to co-operate, this measure would have been applied further around the coastline," Mr Killeen said.

That's the reality of membership of the EU. You accept something you don't want, and would not have done if you were still an independent nation, on the basis that, if you do not accept it, you get something considerably worse.

Then, in the scheme of things, the minister parades this as a "victory" and expects a pat on the back. That is now how the system works.

COMMENT THREAD

In need of pity

It was in late January that Booker picked up on the ongoing saga of the "incredible warming Antarctic", the warmists' answer to the previous obstinacy of that region to conform with the creed that requires that we should all fry unless we reduce our carbon emissions.

Notwithstanding that the original figures were, shall we say, the mother of all inventions, extrapolating limited data from a few ground stations to provide "data infill" of the areas not covered, it now appears that even those data were flawed.

Courtesy of Watts up with that and diverse posts on Steve McIntyre's Cimate Audit, there unravels a tale so convoluted as to defy easy description. But it all points to the single observation – that the temperature data on which the original warmist claims were based rely on unreliable sensors. They are not worth the snow they were buried in.

The broader point, however, is that while the findings from the Watts/McIntyre duo – with their expert readers - are hugely entertaining and provide yet more evidence that the warmists are a bunch of charlatans, they will make no difference at all to the warmist creed and will have no affect whatsoever on the body politic.

The problem is that while the warmists jibber about the science being "settled", this is not about science. We are talking here about the scare dynamic, a social phenomenon which obeys its own rules, where science takes the back seat. It provides merely a patina of authenticity to confirm that which the warmists hold, with or without the science.

Such is the nature of the dynamic that the belief comes first and the "science" is then cherry-picked (and distorted) to provide the evidence to support the belief. And, in the nature of things, any "inconvenient truths" are automatically discarded. Watts and McIntyre fall into that category.

Thus, we get one of the High Priests of the belief system UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon, preening himself in New Delhi today at the start of a three-day conference on – you guessed it – "sustainable development".

Oblivious to the shaky foundation on which his belief system is based – and entirely uncaring – he trots out the same old mantras, telling us that that "failure to tackle climate change will lead to major economic upheaval".

"Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of collapse," he intones. "Failure to combat climate change will increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable development."

All this, of course, is bullshit. Credo in unum deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae ..., he might just as well have chanted, only his "god" is global warming, the god above all gods to which the whole of mankind must be subservient.

The problem is, of course, that you cannot deal with other peoples' belief systems by rational argument – or by other means. The Romans tried those, as did many after them, and look where that got them.

Oddly enough, the death of religion is not persecution – faith is strongest where there are attempts to suppress it - but indifference… and scorn. Few faiths survive both, and the latter is perhaps in this case more powerful. We should not resent the warmists, or fight them. We should pity them, in the same way one would the village idiot, for the delusions in which they are trapped, hoping that one day they are cured of their afflictions.

The nightmare is, of course, the damage these people are doing while in the grip of their delusions, which they inflict on all of us. But the derision of the crowd will eventually get through. These people need our pity. We should not stint in giving it to them.

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

The capacity to destroy II

Having been professionally and emotionally involved (not a happy combination) in the fate of Britain's fishing industry, Booker's column today makes painful reading.

It is the final chapter in the destruction of our once-proud and profitable industry, torn apart by the combined depredations of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy and the wilful zealotary of our own loathsome officials, permitted by the acquiescence of our politicians and the stupidity and malign myopia of the media.

This is a policy which, as Booker observes, has 82-year old Doreen Hicks weeping in the dock after being given a criminal record, fines and costs of £3,500, on threat of imprisonment, just because she was named as a part-owner of her family's fishing boat.

Yet such is malign effect it has on the professional claque of "environmentalists" that we have that extremely unpleasant fool Charles Clover prattling on that "fraudulent fishermen everywhere, even in the EU, lower the price of fish for legal fishermen and kill more fish than they should, depleting scarce stocks that belong to us all."

This landmark case, writes Clover, "is a milestone towards making that kind of behaviour socially unacceptable at last." Booker has his own riposte.

Booker also sheds some light on the Anglesey Aluminium saga, identifying the EU dimension.

The immediate problem is that the Anglesey plant relies heavily on constant supplies of electricity and is supplied at a discount price by the nearby Wylfa nuclear power station. This is now state-owned through the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). If the NDA was privately owned, it says it would be happy to carry on selling power to its largest customer at a discount. But under EU state-aid rules this is now "against the law".

So it has been announced last week that the pant is to close next September, with the loss of 500 jobs. Thanks so much, the EU. Again it has shown yet its capacity to destroy.

As ever more of British industry disappears, writes Booker, with Lord Mandelson predicting that even the City of London will emerge from the slump much reduced, it seems we shall soon have to live on air. Then, when Brussels discovers that air contains carbon dioxide will even that be beyond our reach?

COMMENT THREAD

Waiving the rules

In the wake of last week's report on a "new" Tory policy on fishing, Booker has this week taken a wider look at discarding in his column.

The issues are personalised around a good friend of us both, Mick Mahon, a Newlyn fisherman who has done much to bring to light the criminal madness of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. And, after 25 years of living with the lunacy of the policy, Mick has had enough and has decided he will discard no more. Instead, he is "waiving the rules" and landing all the fish he catches. He gives them away to the Fishermens' mission for charity.

This has so bemused the local fisheries inspector, whose officious zeal has made him the most unpopular man in Newlyn, that his only response do far has been to threaten the mission with prosecution for accepting Mick's charitable gifts.

Of course, if every fisherman in the country did likewise, and was prepared to stand up to the tide of regulation that is progressively destroying the industry, then at least we would have a fighting chance. But, over the years, most fishermen - and especially their representatives - have sought accommodations with our provincial government, in the hope that they could continue to make a living.

This strategy has not worked and now it is left to the likes of Mick to make his defiant but ultimately forlorn gesture, his last shout before he retires from a dying industry, destroyed by the combined effects of a treacherous Ted Heath, supine MPPs (Members of the Provincial Parliament) and over-zealous officialdom.

In years to come, there should be a monument in Trafalgar Square to mark the passing of the British fishing industry, and Mick would make a good model for it. But it should also be a monument to mark the passing of our independence. In that the death of that industry is symbolic of our craven subservience to an alien form of government, the monument would serve as well to mark the loss of that independence.

Perhaps though, rather than Mick, the monument should be a statue of an elephant, made of glass, so that busy passers-by can ignore it completely, as indeed so many do the thing it would represent.

COMMENT THREAD

There's no business like snow business

Published by Canada.com is a jolly little tale about how the EU has taken it upon itself to declare the Arctic region part of Europe's "immediate vicinity" and thus invite itself as a party to talks over the future of polar exploitation.

Even though the commission concedes that the European Union has "no direct coastline on the Arctic Ocean", having decided on this fabled, "immediate vicinity" status, it is thus proposing that all nations which do actually have direct coastlines should conform with "binding international standards" to govern offshore oil extraction. And, of course, the EU should have a hand in framing those "standards".

This move, says Canada.com (rather appropriately under the circumstances) is likely to prompt "a cold stare" from Canada and some other polar nations. But, undeterred, the Commission has still gone ahead an issued a report asserting its growing interest in the natural resources and environmental health of "the rapidly melting Arctic Ocean".

This, the commission proudly declares, its "first step towards and EU Arctic Policy", which it believes is "an important contribution to implementing the Integrated Maritime Policy for the EU."

To that effect, it has identified three main "policy objectives", which are: protecting and preserving the Arctic in unison with its population (presumably the polar bears); promoting sustainable use of resources; and contributing to "enhanced Arctic multilateral governance".

To bolster its claims to being a party to this "enhanced Arctic multilateral governance", it has opened a "thematic website", which proudly offers an "action plan" for the "EU and the Arctic region".

There, it tells us that the EU is inextricably linked to the Arctic Region (hereafter referred to as the Arctic) by a unique combination of history, geography, economy and scientific achievements. Three member states - Denmark (Greenland), Finland and Sweden - have territories in the Arctic. Two other Arctic states - Iceland and Norway - are members of the European Economic Area. Furthermore, Canada, Russia and the United States are strategic partners of the EU.

The problem for the ever-ambitious EU is that Finland and Sweden, as well as the EU-associated "economic partner" Iceland do not have Arctic Ocean coastlines. Those three nations were not invited to attend a Greenland summit in May that resulted in the five-nation Ilulissat Declaration - an explicit rejection of any new multilateral frameworks for governing future economic activity in the Arctic.

While noting that Canada and the four other signatories to the Ilulissat Declaration have committed to the "orderly settlement of any overlapping claims" in the Arctic, the commission's report pointedly states that "since then, several of them have announced steps extending or affirming their national jurisdiction and strengthening their Arctic presence."

This, of course, simply will not do for the commission. National jurisdiction, as we all know, is an anathema to the EU, not least because, "Climate change might bring increased productivity in some fish stocks and changes in spatial distributions of others."

Even worse, "New areas may become attractive for fishing with increased access due to reduced sea ice coverage. For some of the Arctic high seas waters there is not yet an international conservation and management regime in place." This, the commission says, with more than a hint of desperation, "might lead to unregulated fisheries." You can sense rather than see the stress on the word "unregulated", the ultimate of all horrors.

One is almost tempted to snigger quietly at the back of the room at the chutzpah of these people, except they are serious. They will keep plugging away in the hope that they wear down the other players and eventually get their way.

However, since much of the new EU policy is predicated on the premise that there is that "rapidly melting Arctic Ocean", perhaps someone might do them a favour and take the commission for a trip into the ice fields and show them what we can all see from the satellite pics – that the Arctic Ocean ain't melting.

Whoever does this kind deed, though, would do us all an even greater favour by leaving them all there.

COMMENT THREAD

It has come to this

So low down on the news agenda is it that, even though The Sunday Telegraph offers a short, five paragraph piece on it in the print edition, even this newspaper does not seem concerned enough to post the story online. It will, therefore, be missed by commentators who surf the net for their news.

The story itself is headed, "Tories pledge to end fish dumping" – the obscene practice of "discards" which is a central feature of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, about which Christopher Booker has written so much and which had kept this blog continually exercised, most recently here.

So, if the Tories are pledging to end this obscenity, this must surely be good news, except for the fact that it should already be Tory policy. That it became so, briefly, was happily announced by Booker in his column on 8 January 2005. That was the day before Owen Paterson, then shadow fisheries minister, launched his consultation paper on fisheries, which included the unilateral repatriation of the CFP, an event which was also recorded by this blog.

This policy had in fact been adopted by Michael Howard, the former Tory leader who, after frenetic behind-the-scenes negotiations, affirmed it on 10 June 2004, after a clear statement at the Scottish Conservative Party Conference in Dundee on 14 June 2004, again recorded by this blog.

However, with the accession of David Cameron to the leadership of the Tory Party, after its earlier defeat in the general election, the policy was quietly ditched, without even a formal statement to that effect.

So, here we are, more than three years later and, once again, it looks as if the policy is back. But, as we all know to our cost, appearances can be deceptive. What we learn is that Bill Wiggin, now the shadow fisheries minister, has apparently discussed new proposals with Joe Borg, the EU fishing commissioner. From these discussions, what David Cameron's new "conservative" party now has in mind is – according to The Sunday Telegraph - as follows:

The party is seeking EU support for a pilot scheme that would require British fishermen to land and report all fish caught and killed in the catching process.

From a robust, principled stand, where the Tories would reassert control over a valuable national asset, and re-introduce a proper and effective management system, David Cameron now proposes that his fisheries minister in a new Tory government would do what Tory ministers have always done since the very first days when we joined the then Common Market.

He will go cap-in-hand to Brussels and there he will say "pretty please" to our real masters, and ask if they would, very kindly, allow us to stop doing something which, had we been a sovereign nation, we would never have actually done in the first place.

That is what it has come to. That is what we always suspected might happen and that gives us the revealing clue as to Mr Cameron's real policy towards the European Union … more of the same, as it has always been. What we can't say, however, is that we have been betrayed. We never expected any different from Mr Cameron.

The question is, on this basis, are we expected to vote for the Conservative Party? And, if so, how are they different from Labour?

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Engrenage again

We've written about it before, most recently in June last year and then again in the January of the same year.

This is engrenage - not talked about much in polite company and if you mention it to the average politician of journalist, you will be greeted with a blank stare. Yet, in our June post, we explained that this mechanism, loosely translated as gearing is one of the major drivers of political integration within the European Union.

We even went so far as to explain the mechanism, even in the certain knowledge that many of those who should know will steer clear of this blog, like it was the plague, and this remain in their desired state of blissful ignorance. For the rest, those of us who have ambitions to drive the tumbrels or cheer their passing, we wrote thus:

First of all, it prevents member states implementing their own controls in a vital policy area (such as immigration), and then starts to regulate in these areas itself. The regulation is invariably incomplete and functions poorly, requiring more legislation. It is then not long before there are demands for additional laws, whence the EU commission happily obliges with proposals – grandly declaring that the member states are calling for "more Europe".

So it is that we see another example of the mechanism, this one relating to what qualifies – despite intense competition – as one of the most disastrous policy yet to be devised by the EU, the Common Fisheries Policy.

Through this dire, bureaucratic construct, the EU has managed to devastate the fishing grounds of the member states and, in particular, the formerly teeming waters of the Continental shelf around the UK, variously reckoned to have held some 80 percent of the commercial fishing stocks in the waters that come within the boundaries of the EU member states.

But, all-encompassing though it might be – there is one huge gap in the policy. It leaves the enforcement of the EU fisheries laws to the member states. And having turned commercial fishing virtually a criminal activity, having demonised fishermen and driven most of them into penury or alternative livelihood, the EU commission is complaining that those foolhardy or desperate enough to remain in the industry are not being fined enough by their member state courts when they fall foul of EU rules, and that there is too much variation in fines for similar offences in the different member state courts.

Thus, in an absolutely classic example of engrenage the commission is asking member states to approve "dramatically tougher enforcement of fishing rules". There is no word, of course, of the EU itself having created a conservation disaster and an entirely unworkable, which creates the very "criminals" to whom the "tougher enforcement" should apply.

Instead, it invokes visions of "motherhood and apple pie", pleading that this move is necessary to "stop years of illegal catches that have devastated species such as cod and tuna."

With such noble ambitions declared – quietly sliding over the real agenda, the pursuit of political integration – the commission thus proposes that EU officials would receive new powers to pursue fishermen in their home countries for offences such as fishing in protected spawning areas or out of season for threatened species. Inefficient and costly checks at sea would be replaced by reinforced investigations at port.

Needless to say the fishermen must be punished severely under this new regime, with fines rising to as much as €300,000 for serious breaches of (EU) fishing rules - 100 times greater than current fines in some cases. Repeat offenders could lose their permits.

To bolster his case, EU fisheries commissioner Joe Borg declares that low fines and weak enforcement by some member states "makes a mockery" of the EU's "tough catch quotas," calling in aid one of its favoured captive NGOs, the WWF, to support it.

But, while the WWF exudes horror at the supposed depredation of the evil fishermen – thereby seeking to enlist the approval of all "right-minded people", who have been indoctrinated with decades of "anti-fishermen" propaganda – the EU gets a new brick in the growing edifice of its common judicial system, with a uniform application of fines across the EU, monitored and controlled, of course, by the EU commission.

We have already seen a similar attempt with EU environmental laws, this one driven through the ECJ, but this is the first overt attempt to standardise penalties through the direct application of a new EU law.

If successful, this will set a stronger precedent for a system of common penalties throughout the EU. In the fullness of time, possibly after the passage of many years, the commission will then look to encroachment into another policy area. And so, slowly, steadily and inexorably, the process of engrenage does its deadly work, so stealthily and cleverly that hardly anyone notices – much less protests.

Jean Monnet – deviser of the mechanism – certainly knew what he was doing.

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A totally avoidable disaster

Right on cue, following the report that the EU is planning to "reform" the CFP, The Scotsman reveals that half of Scots cod catches are being thrown back into the sea

Described by fishermen's leaders as "a monumental moral disaster", this is a direct and inescapable consequence of the EU’s idea of fisheries management which in this case has led to a "staggering total" of 12,000 metric tons of marketable cod, with a potential value of £25 million, being discarded.

These data come from marine scientists at the government's Fisheries Research Service in Aberdeen. They show that, from a survey, carried out between January and June, 40 percent of landings of cod by weight are having to be discarded to prevent the fleet breaching the EU's quota restrictions.

At least 90 per cent of the catches are above the minimum marketable landing size, yet the above quota fish are being thrown back dead.

Unfortunately, it does not seem as if the fishermen have any better idea of how to deal with this issue than the EU. At a meeting involving industry representatives, scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers in Edinburgh next Thursday, the Scottish White Fish Producers' Association (SWFPA) will making its own pitch.

It will suggest that the Scottish fleet is given an increase in next year's cod quota in return for cuts in the number of days they spend at sea and fishing ground closures.

What it cannot suggest, however, is that the quota system is abandoned altogether – that being the bedrock of the CFP management system and thus beyond change – together with a total ban on "discards".

As we have been pointing out, most recently here, these measures together with the adoption of selective fishing techniques and a regime of "days at sea" controls on fishing effort, allocated by class of boat, would go a long way towards removing the obscenity of this waste.

However, as always, the EU is unable to respond, necessarily maintaining the core of a flawed system as the only such system which can be administered by a remote, supra-national authority controlling a multinational fleet.

At its heart, therefore, the CFP is irredeemably flawed because the EU is irredeemably flawed, which is why we will continue to see headlines of the type offered by The Scotsman and nothing at all will be done about then, other than continue cutting the sizes of the fleets as fish stocks contract as a result of the poor management.

The tragedy is that this mad-made and totally avoidable disaster exists only because UK politicians have neither the guts nor resolve to do anything about it. It is one of the prices we pay for continued membership of the EU – although paid by the fishermen and us, the fish buyers, rather than the loathesome politicians who so carelessly allow a valuable national resource to be destroyed.

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The mother of all failures

From the organisation that wants to sell you snake oil carbon credits (or, at least, make you pay through the nose for them) comes the stunning news that it plans to carry out a "full review" of its flagship Common Fisheries Policy, with the intention of proposing "major reform" by 2012.

Reform is required, says fisheries commissioner Borg, because "in its current form, the CFP does not encourage responsible behaviour by either fishermen or politicians." He adds: "The management tools we use reward narrow-minded, short-term decision-making, which has now undermined the sustainability of our fisheries."

Needless to say, the commissioners recipe for reform is just as narrow minded as the decision-making he is bitching about. Having presided over a system that insists on fishermen throwing back into the sea dead something like sixty percent of the fish they catch, he complains that that 88 percent of the bloc's fish stocks are overexploited and then attributes the problem to the fishing fleet being capable of catching "two to three times" the maximum sustainable yield.

Of course, if fishermen did not have to throw so many fish back, the fish stocks would be considerably healthier than they are now. And if fishing effort was managed day-by-day with temporary and seasonal closures implemented on the basis of real time information from fisherman, rather than one-year-old data from survey vessels test-fishing in statistically-assigned grids, stocks would be even healthier – capable of sustaining a fleet several times larger than it is now.

As it is, the fishing policy is neither science-based nor attuned to fisheries management. It is a political instrument designed to reconcile the competing demands for a resource to which all EU nations have access and for which no one bears any responsibility.

The policy, therefore, is fundamentally flawed and, as long as it is managed by the EU, will remain so. No amount of trimming round the edges, or "reform" will improve it. Hence the ultimate policy is, and always will be, to preside over the totally unnecessary decline in fish stocks then, tardily, to impose increasingly draconian measures to limit catches and finally to cut the size of the fleet.

Nothing changes and nothing will change. The CFP, in EU terms, is and always will be the mother of all failures (unless you count the CAP). And, being the EU, you can be assured it will have plenty of progeny to keep it company in its old age.

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Reality is a bitter pill to take

There was I thinking that I've done climate change to death today so I must change the subject for the "Horlicks".

But hey! Up pops this, which stands up as a good story in its own right, illustrating the bizarre convolutions of the EU as it tries – and fails – to implement one of its policies. It could be about the Common Fisheries Policy – the mess-up is the constant, only the subject matter changes. But it just happens (complete coincidence, Guv!) to be about, er … climate change. More specifically, it is about the latest twist in the EU’s emission trading scheme (ETS).

In the last piece we did on the subject, we pointed out that the electricity generation industry was a prime candidate for the ETS treatment – generation cannot be moved offshore and the captive customer base cannot buy its electricity elsewhere. Whatever costs are loaded onto the product, the (domestic) customer has to grin and bear it.

This is not the case, of course, with other products, the manufacturers of which the EU wants to include in the ETS – as indeed we've been pointing out in previous posts, where even the Germans are getting restless. Top-load them with costs and they just move out and export their finished products back into the EU member states.

Now, having been told this innumerable times, this salient fact is just beginning to dawn on that repository of intellectual excellence, the EU commission. Having just been presented with a report which looks into the issue, it has been told that, "parts of Europe's steel and aluminium industries are highly exposed to international competition". Therefore, they "may" need free allowances to emit carbon dioxide after 2013, despite the intention then to auction the permits.

This, believe it or not, is according to "a preliminary EU analysis", which identifies aluminium smelting (pictured), hot rolled steel and slabs produced in basic oxygen furnaces and clinker as industries which may need the free allowances. Yet, despite other sectors such as chemicals, ceramics, pulp and paper, refineries, glass or metals, all variously threatening to offshore, the report did not cover these industries.

Neither is the commission rushing to make a decision, even though the industries affected are pleading for "clarity" so they can plan their investments. The commission is holding back because, it says, information on exemptions from permit charging would weaken its hand in global climate negotiations next summer.

So it is that the commission is ducking the obvious and necessary decision – that, in order to avoid the wholesale loss of industry, it is going to have to back off from its grandiose scheme to save the planet. If it does back off, though, the EU is not going to meet its self-imposed emission reduction targets. Perhaps more to the point, it is going to lose leverage when it tries to bully other countries into joining its economic suicide pact.

Reality is such a bitter pill to take.

COMMENT THREAD

Paying through the nose

Although the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) is set to cost electricity generators (and thus us, the customers) £2 billion over the next four years - as permits go up for auction - other major industrial companies are set to make hundreds of millions out of the EU's "generosity".

This is according to The Guardian, which is reporting that many companies have been over-allocated with emission permits, equivalent to nine million tons of carbon dioxide – all of which can be sold for cash.

Some 200 companies are beneficiaries covering all sectors, from steel and cement making, to car manufacturing and the food and drink industry. Says The Guardian, dozens of household names such as Ford, Thames Water, Astra Zeneca, Heathrow Airport, Toyota and Vauxhall are among the companies that could benefit.

One of the largest beneficiaries is Castle Cement, which makes a quarter of all British cement at three works in Lancashire, north Wales (pictured) and Rutland. While total CO2 emissions from the three plants have fallen from 2.3m metric tons in 2005 to 2.1m in 2007, they have been allocated 2.9m metric ton in permits for each of the next five years - an annual surplus of 829,000 permits.

At the current price of £21 per metric ton, the company could sell its surplus permits for £83.5m over the five years.

Perversely, some enterprises have been allocated fewer permits than they require, not least the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. It is predicting an annual deficit of 5,800 and is thus needing to siphon over £120,000 a year from its clinical budget to buy extra permits.

And, not only is the electricity industry having to pay for its permits, it is also 70 million metric tons short on allocation, which it will have to buy on the open "carbon" market. At current prices, that is nearly £1.5 billion added to our electricity bills.

The Guardian cites Bryony Worthington, founder of the campaigning group Sandbag, who notes that this "… means electricity customers are effectively subsidising heavy industry's right to pollute, while being urged to make environmental sacrifices in their own lives."

And that is they way things now work in this country – courtesy of our new masters in Brussels. But, from an organisation that brought us the Common Fisheries Policy, did we ever expect anything else?

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The consequences of meddling

It seemed so easy – nip in and force mobile phone companies to cut their fees and, hey presto! You have a "Europe of results" and everybody will love you.

As it turns out, it ain't that simple. Start interfering with the complex workings of the mobile market and you get all sorts of unintended consequences. That much comes over with crystal clarity from the reaction of Vodafone - one of Europe's largest providers – to the latest meddling by the commission.

As recorded by the Financial Times and the BBC, Vodaphone is vented its anger at Viviane Reding by making the “extraordinary claim” that 40m Europeans could be forced to ditch their mobile phones, all because the EU wants to be loved.

The current battle is about so-called "mobile termination rates", industry jargon for the charges mobile operators impose on each other, together with fixed-line phone companies, for connecting calls to their wireless networks.

These wholesale charges represent between 15 and 20 percent of operators' revenues, and have been an important means of recovering costs. But now, after its "success" with roaming charges, Reding wants these charges cut.

Vodafone's response is that, if they are cut, retail charges will have to be raised to compensate for the losses, pointing out a rather simple truth that seems to have evaded the commission, like: "Failure to recover costs risks bankruptcy."

At stake is a completely re-shaped charging system, adopting a US-style system whereby mobile users pay to receive calls as well as making them. Reding thinks this is a good idea because users there – reputedly - pay lower call charges and make greater use of their mobiles.

On the back of lower termination charges, Vodafone argues that operators will have no option but to raise retail charges for European customers, also warning that the impact of increased charges would be felt by less well-off customers who have cheap pay-as-you-go deals with operators rather than the more expensive monthly contracts.

This is because Vodafone says most of its revenue from pay-as-you-go customers is derived from them receiving incoming calls, which attract termination rates. These customers make relatively few outgoing calls.

On this basis, a survey by the market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres, commissioned by Vodafone finds that about 10 percent of Europe's mobile phone users – estimated at 40 million - would ditch their mobiles, rather defeating the object of Reding’s latest initiative.

Whatever the outcome, this one looks like running and running, the only certainty being that, by the time the commission has finished meddling, the mobile phone industry will be in about as good a shape as the Common Fisheries Policy.

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Autres directions

A perspicacious Guardian today notes that the EU is in as much disarray about how to handle the looming recession as it is over how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus.

Drawing on the experience so many of us have had of baffling French road signs, it suggests that "toutes directions", the often confusing signpost at crossroads in French provincial towns, just about sums up eurozone government responses so far.

Actually, we can do better than that. Attempting to find our way to Strasbourg one day, driving through the by-ways of Alsace completely lost, we came to a T-junction in a small town, unmarked on our map. Witnessed by my increasingly acerbic co-editor, then one of my backseat drivers passengers, we were utterly confounded by a single sign offering the choice between "toutes directions" and "autres directions". That, it seemed to us, was the most appropriate paradigm for the European Union.

Returning to The Guardian, it tells us that France, as holder of the EU presidency, is effectively pushing for a concerted series of activist, counter-cyclical measures to be adopted when finance ministers meet in Nice in the middle of next month - even if it means busting the bloc's three percent budget deficit limit.

In this – predictably - it can count on support from its "Club Med" partners in Italy and Spain but Germany, determined to maintain fiscal discipline and avoid a repeat of the 1970s, is resolutely opposed. And so is the EU commission, while the UK is out on a limb, together with the Irish and the Nordics (several limbs, actually).

Although it retails a sorry tale of confusion, it is a pity though that the paper cannot see the bigger picture. It is not only the "looming recession" and the question of "how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus" that finds the EU in disarray. The impending clash over the Common Agricultural Policy will point up yet more disarray, while the continued impasse over GM crop approvals, the disagreement over biofuels and the energy policy generally, are all examples of the EU haring off in "toutes directions".

In fact, from the experience of the Common Fisheries Policy – branded by its own commissioner as "immoral" - to the waste policy, immigration and high level initiatives in the Middle East, nothing the EU touches ever works. It leaves behind it a trail of wreckage, disarray and confusion.

Never more has it ever been more urgent that we in the UK should be looking for that sign which says, "autres directions".

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Good news and bad news

The most important economic news of recent weeks, Irwin Stelzer tells us in today's edition of The Sunday Times is the recovery of the long-comatose dollar.

But what is good news for the US economy seems to be bad news for the eurozone. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported earlier this week that the ECB was taking a hammering for making a serious error by raising interest rates a quarter point to 4.25pc last month.

It seems that it has misjudged the seriousness of the downturn in the eurozone economy, which has seen a contraction of 0.2 percent in the second quarter, compared with the first three months of this year, with the economies of Germany, France and Italy probably now in full recession.

In Spain, the picture is darkening so fast in Spain that Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero cancelled holidays and called his cabinet back to Madrid mid-week for the first emergency session of its kind since the Franco dictatorship. The crisis meeting agreed to a €20bn (£16bn) blitz on public works, tax cuts, and a mortgage rescue to halt the downward spiral.

Growth has also turned negative in Ireland, Denmark, Latvia, and Estonia, while grinding to a halt in Sweden and The Netherlands. Iceland contracted by a staggering 3.7 percent.

However, if Ambrose always has a "down" on the eurozone, and is thus considered by some a little biased on the pessimistic side, not so the Wall Street Journal which yesterday took a swipe at the "colleagues".

Throughout the depth of the financial crisis in the US, the Euros have been warbling consistently about "decoupling" – arguing that the mighty European economy is no longer a slave to the American economy, and obeys its own rule. Europe would remain sound while the US would sink into a bottomless pit.

And, says the WSJ, Euro-zone hopes about decoupling from the US economy seem to have come true. But, in tune with the immutable law that dictates that nemesis always follows hubris, this decoupling is not quite as planned. While the eurozone contracted by 0.2, the US posted second-quarter growth of 0.5 percent

Like US fears of a recession, says the paper, the eurozone's economic resilience appears to be, if not mostly "mental," at least somewhat exaggerated. Despite all the talk about a US recession, it concludes, the economy may actually unravel faster across in Europe.

This is certainly what the markets think, for the moment, even the Financial Times reporting that they are becoming increasingly convinced that the US is best-placed to weather the global downturn. But then, if you think about it, for an organisation that gave us the Common Fisheries Policy, it never was a safe bet that the EU would be any better at managing the eurozone economy.

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The worst of the worst

As with farmers, we are so often told that the fishing industry is in "crisis" that that very fact becomes part of the political wallpaper – such a constant and familiar state that we no longer take any notice of it.

Thus when Booker tells us today that "Fishermen face 'worst ever crisis'" it becomes just another part of the background, ironically to become tomorrow's fish and chip wrapping paper – if EU food packaging rules still allow such use.

The fact is, though, that fishermen are facing their worst ever crisis and, while they have long suffered from the depredations of the CFP – seasoned in part with their own stupidity and venality – the proximate cause of their distress is our own government.

In the context of an EU single market, where British fishermen exploit the same seas and compete with their foreign "brethren", we have a situation where the EU commission permits member states to subsidise their fleets – an option taken up by all our main competitors with the egregious exception of the United Kingdom.

It was for that reason that a small, disconsolate rump of the industry presented itself last Tuesday at the headquarters of DEFRA, in Smith Square, London, to present fishing minister Jonathan Shaw with a message well known to him, to which he and this government are entirely indifferent.

The statistics, in themselves, are stark. Numbers of active commercial fishermen are down by 40 percent over the last 14 years and, by the end of this year, thousands more of our surviving 12,000 will be out of business. Yet, in 1973 – before we joined the Common Market - Britain had the largest fishing fleet in Europe.

Booker illustrates the level of the current crisis with an account of visitors in recent weeks who have been to many of our fishing ports, from Fraserburgh in Scotland to Newlyn in Cornwall. They have been shocked to see so many boats tied up, because their owners can no longer afford to put to sea, "hit by the double whammy of soaring fuel prices, up 320 per cent in five years, and draconian new Brussels quota rules, which mean the amount of fish they can land is below the point where it is economical to fish at all."

But, although the crisis created by the exploding price of diesel, which accounts for 60 percent of a fishing boat's costs, is one affecting all Europe's fishing industries – a bad situation is made even worse by this government's refusal to match the subsidies paid to their competitors.

Under EU rules, Spain is allowed to give £98 million to its fishermen, to enable them "to stay competitive". France, which can give £106 million and has every intention of doing so. But although Britain is permitted by Brussels to give £78 million, Mr Shaw made it clear to the fishermen on Tuesday that they cannot expect a penny. The Government, he told them, "does not have the financial resources available".

The real subtext of Mr Shaw's refusal, writes Booker, was spelled out by Commissioner Borg in Brussels, when he said that the future for "European fisheries" lay not in "false solutions" but in "restructuring, to create a smaller, more fuel-efficient fleet".

In other words, if thousands more British fishermen go to the wall, that must be part of the EU's long-term solution. Their French and Spanish competitors will be grateful that their governments do not agree with the immovable Mr Shaw. That is why, by the end of the year, a great many more of them will have survived than now seems likely in the country which, until it gave its fishing waters away to Brussels.

Therein lies an example of the nightmare we have to face. It is not so much Brussels we have to deal with as the combined effect of both Brussels and out own government – the combination proving lethal to our economic survival. And, while we can all sympathise with the plight of the fishermen, that combination is beyond the scope of the political system, as established, to redress.

Thus, we shrug our shoulders and, metaphorically, walk away. It is not that we don't care - we do. But there is nothing we can do, so we go away and indulge in political theatre. In such small ways is the loss of our democracy measured, and in such small ways do we lose the heart of our nation.

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