A fiasco over fish

March 21, 2018

Theresa May will meet EU leaders tomorrow for a crucial summit on Brexit. As the UK prime minister heads for Brussels, one topic dominates the minds of some Tory MPs more than all others: fish.

A group of hard Brexiter Conservative MPs are livid that Mrs May has agreed that the UK will remain in the Common Fisheries Policy during the 21-month transition period. This morning, they have been protesting — together with Nigel Farage — on the river Thames outside the palace of Westminster.

Most strikingly, 13 Conservatives — and one from the Democratic Unionist party — have signed a letter hinting that the transitional arrangement means they may oppose the entire Article 50 withdrawal bill when it comes up for a Commons vote.

This row over fishing prompts a few questions. First, why are fisheries rights so significant for Brexiters? After all, fishing counts for a tiny fraction of the British economy. In 2015, it contributed just £604m to gross domestic product, employing about 12,000 fishers and a further 18,000 in fish processing.

The answer is that the industry believes it was betrayed when the UK joined the European Community in 1973. Britain’s fishermen believe that, as a result of joining the CFP, they were deprived of opportunities that the UK would have enjoyed if it had stayed put.

“If you think of Iceland, it has a 200-mile exclusion area and it controls all the fish in that zone,” a former Whitehall official tells me. “The fishing industry believes we would have been in the same position if we had not joined the CFP.”

The former official adds: “The political resonance of this is also great because fishing communities tend to be peripheral and believe they have been exploited. And the CFP debate touches on all the things that get Brexiters going like coastal borders, maritime rights and so on.”

Second, why are the Brexiters so angry about the transitional deal?

Brexiters have long argued that the moment the UK leaves the EU in March 2019, it should take back control of its coastal waters. However, as a result of the transition deal, nearly everything will stay the same for a further 21 months.

Indeed, the UK’s situation during the transition will be worse. The EU will go on deciding what the total allowable catches are for each nation under the CFP. But the UK will not be in the council that sets those TACs, so it will have less control over its own fishing than now.

Is Tory Brexiter anger over this so great that Mrs May could lose a vote on the withdrawal agreement?

Labour could vote against the withdrawal agreement and if the 13 MPs who signed today’s letter join them, that might well deprive the government of its majority.

As Andrew Sparrow writes on his Guardian blog today, the 13 MPs might be motivated to act in this way if they believe that defeat for the government would lead to Britain leaving the EU with no deal, something they are happy to contemplate.

But that outcome could lead to the kind of chaos that undermines Brexit altogether. So it is safe to assume that the MPs will line up behind Mrs May in the vote — and that they are expressing anger now to highlight that there must be no surrender to Brussels on fisheries when the final trade deal is agreed.

Finally, will Britain’s fishermen be sold down the river by the UK government when a final trade deal is signed?

Probably. The EU’s vessels catch much more in UK waters, than UK vessels’ catch in EU waters (£400m v £100m) and this gives the UK a strong negotiating hand. But there are two reasons why Britain’s fishermen should tremble.

First, if Britain plays hard ball over giving the EU rights to UK waters, the Europeans will probably impose tariffs on British fish exports. As Ian Dunt explained in a piece for politics.co.uk last year: “We export around 80 per cent of our wild-caught seafood, with four of the top five destinations being European countries. Excluding EU fishing vessels from the UK is very likely to result in the EU slapping down high tariffs on fish, causing huge damage to the fishing industry and coastal communities in the UK.”

Second, when it comes to the final trade deal, the UK fishing industry’s interests will probably be surrendered so that Britain can win more preferential access to EU markets for financial services — which are overwhelmingly more important for the British economy.

As the former Whitehall official tells me: “The story of the Brexit negotiations thus far has been that the British have started out acting tough and ended up surrendering. And I promise you, it will be the same on fish.”

A Brexit withdrawal agreement in name only

“Theresa May once promised that there would be a robust ‘red, white and blue Brexit’. We now have a limp green, yellow and white Brexit, where the UK has not in any meaningful way taken back control of anything. All the time and effort expended since the referendum has been to create a situation where most things will stay the same."(David Allen Green in the FT)

Committee calls for early deal for science and research

“If there were to be a protracted delay in agreeing this, it would have unfortunate effects, and it cannot be taken for granted that the UK will retain its leadership position in science and innovation. The Committee concludes that reaching an agreement on this should now be as important to the Government as addressing the question of security.” (Commons Science and Technology Select Committee report)

Can the EU step up to a win-win Brexit outcome in financial services?

“The EU’s existing equivalence regime would need some tweaks. The current regime, with its one-way, unilateral equivalence determinations, does not go far enough to avoid uncertainty and therefore potential harm.” (Barnabas Reynolds, a partner at Shearman & Sterling, on BrexitCentral)

Hard numbers

Dutch voters head to the ballot box in regional elections on Wednesday — a year on from a national vote where Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) suffered defeat.

But Dutch Euroscepticism doesn’t end with Mr Wilders’ firebrand populism. Among the groups hoping to make a splash in the regional vote is the Forum for Democracy — the Netherlands’ newest political force which explicitly backs a “Nexit” from the EU and rails against the country’s “cartel” of establishment parties.

Led by the photogenic 35-year-old Thierry Baudet — a pseudo-intellectual who likes playing the piano in his parliamentary office — the FvD has shot up opinion polls to second place behind Mark Rutte’s ruling VVD. Mr Wilders’ party, meanwhile, is languishing. Read more

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