Starmer’s ‘Brexit reset’ has cast fishermen adrift

This week, UK prime minister Keir Starmer proudly presented his dismal plans for a so-called Brexit reset. This includes, among other things, sacrificing Britain’s already hard-pressed fishing communities to the EU, by handing over fishing grounds for another 12 years.

This deal is, simply put, disastrous. It massively extends what was supposed to be a temporary post-Brexit phase-out period for EU vessels to continue fishing in British waters. This was originally set to expire next June, five years after the UK formally left the EU. It will now only run out in June 2038. While future governments will technically be able to rip up the agreement, the deal contains a clause that allows EU leaders to respond with punitive tariffs on British exports, should fishing access be restricted before then.

It should come as no surprise that hard-nosed EU negotiators should demand, at the last minute, a block on handing back control of Britain’s fishing waters. After all, the UK has some of the richest fishing grounds in the world and by far the most productive in Europe. Before Brexit, around half of EU catches came from UK waters.

For British fishermen, Starmer’s Brexit reset is a familiar betrayal. It was in 1970 that Conservative prime minister Edward Heath first colluded to secretly give away this country’s greatest renewable asset. This laid the foundations for the Common Fisheries Policy, introduced in 1983, which enshrined equal access to European Economic Community (EEC) member states’ waters. It imposed quotas ostensibly to prevent over-fishing, but it disproportionately disadvantaged British fishermen.

Even after the EU and UK finally secured a Brexit deal in 2021, EU fishing vessels maintained the right to fish UK waters until 2026. This was yet another blow for British fishing communities, which already had to endure a raw deal through the CFP quota system. In theory, after Brexit, the UK should have gained a bigger share of the fishing quota. In practice, most of the UK quota – 54 per cent – is in any case owned by foreign interests, and the rest by a few millionaires. Small fishing outfits were squeezed out under this system.

Other island nations, as well as those with long coastlines, seem to treasure the natural resources they are blessed with and will stop at nothing to defend their interests for the nation and future generations. In fact, Greenland was one of the first countries to leave the EEC back in 1985 (years before Brexit was even a word), largely because it wanted greater control over fishing rights. Similarly, Norway is still not a formal member of the European Union, in part because EU membership demands participation in the CFP – one of the most insane rackets ever devised.

Britain’s ruling class has long taken a different approach. Fishing, like so many other British sectors, fell victim to the trend for rapid de-industrialisation, selling off anything not nailed down and trusting in the vagaries of the finance sector. This led directly to the effective privatisation of the fishing sector and the growth in unregulated trade in licences. It also further encouraged the influx of ‘quota hoppers’ from Spain and the Netherlands. That is, when fishing vessels registered in the UK are effectively owned and operated by nationals or companies from another EU member state, thus granting them access to fish under the UK’s quota, rather than their own nation’s. By 1996, there were around 150 such quota hoppers on the UK register. Around 40 of those vessels had joined before CFP quotas took effect. The rest had simply bought their way in since.

This process has seen fishing rights stripped from many small coastal communities in the UK. Instead, they have been consolidated in a handful of very rich fishing monopolies and transformed into a tradable commodity. An Unearthed investigation published in 2018 found that well over a quarter of the UK’s fishing quota – 29 per cent – was in the hands of just five families from the The Sunday Times Rich List. The reach of this tiny elite dwarfs the holdings of the many quota hoppers, who in total hold 13 per cent of UK quota. Overall, more than two-thirds of the UK’s fishing quota is now in the hands of just 25 companies.

One of the groups that has been most ill-served by the UK’s management of fishing rights has been its small-scale, inshore fishermen who are leaving the industry in despair. This group comprises more than three-quarters of the UK’s fishing fleet and provides around half of the jobs in the catching sector.

The fishing communities that have already been crippled by over half a century of greed, political horse-trading and an environmental disaster created by the lunatic CFP are viewed as expendable by political elites. Starmer’s so-called reset is nothing more than a reheated betrayal. It is a continuation of the long, slow sellout of Britain’s coastal communities.

Brian Denny is a journalist who wrote the pamphlet, ‘Rebuild Britain’s Fishing Industry’ for Rebuild Britain.