‘Fishy Tales’ we’ve heard while No Deal looms

 

In a few hours we’ll know if it’s No Deal or the final Brexit betrayal. While we wait, I’ll ‘entertain’ you with some fishy tales which saw the light of day in an astonishing instance of ‘must give the other side a say’. The DT yesterday afternoon had reports on fishing and France in the DT, articles which even six months ago wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

Let’s look first though on a report about wails of dismay by Remain Tories in regard to the news that the RN was preparing for patrolling our maritime areas after a No Deal Brexit.

It started with a BC interview of Lord Patten and Tobias Ellwood MP, reported in the DT. The BC gave them air time to howl over the leaked news that the Royal Navy was preparing to protect UK fishermen against French incursions. We recall that there were some such incidents in the past which weren’t precisely peaceful. Patten and Ellwood denounced BJ of being a horrible ‘English Nationalist’, of being “on a “runaway train of English exceptionalism” in thinking the country would prosper under no deal.” (paywalled link). 

Not only were the comments (over 2,000 this morning) unanimously scathing about Patten’s and Ellwood’s remarks, many of them pointed out that Patten was a former EU Commissioner and gets his nice pension, tax-free, from the EU. 

And for once these Tory Remainers were put in place – or rather; stuffed – in the same article, by Admiral Lord Alan West, a retired First Sea Lord. I suspect he was picked by the BC because he became a Labour politician after he retired. They must have hoped for more wails. However, this isn’t how it turned out. The DT quotes him verbatim, and it’s well worth reading:

“Lord West said: “It is absolutely appropriate that the Royal Navy should protect our waters if the position is that we are a sovereign state and our Government has said we don’t want other nations there. It is absolutely appropriate for the navy to do as it is told by the Government. There are complications in that you can push vessels aside, you can cut their fishing tackle but boarding these foreign ships, they’ll need to pass probably a little thing through Parliament to give authority to board and get on them. There is no doubt if you are a fisherman who has fished for years there – they are, as our fishermen are, quite stormy people – and you get a bit of a punch-up and you might need some marines and things.” (paywalled link)

Methinks this former First Sea Lord knows a bit more about these things than the wailing Remain Tories. He actually knows ‘things’ on the ground – or should that be ‘things on the water’? – thus his points carry far more weight than what the Pattens and Ellwoods and other Remain politicians might say in these last hours before No Deal Brexit. They, and those the Sunday TV shows will inevitably wheel out, ought to be asked why they’d rather submit to a foreign power than support our country.

Here’s the other fishy tale to entertain us while we wait. It’s a report – by the DT’s Paris correspondent, no less. We know that Macron wants ‘his substantial slice’ of the fish cake and won’t budge. We know that Brussels believes that a No Deal will bring our country to its knees and will force us back to their negotiating table, begging for crumbs, crying out to be let back under the mighty Brussels boot. 

So what do French fishermen cry about? Are they defiant in the face of being patrolled by the RN? Are they preparing for naval battles in the Channel? Oh yes they are – but not with us and the RN! This is the headline:

“France gears up for war with European neighbours if locked out of British waters by no deal Brexit – Dutch and German trawlers are thought to be eyeing up French waters already” (paywalled link)

That is, you’d agree, quite a turn-up for the books! We’re told that the small boats of French fishermen catch 70% of their EU quota in our waters and one might therefore expect their anger being directed against our fishermen, but no:

“With no deal in sight, Olivier Le Prêtre, head of the Hauts-de-France fishing council […] said he feared the French would be overrun by European rivals if the UK cut them out of theirs. “If it was only French fishermen in French waters, then no-deal might be ok but we have the Belgians, the Dutch to contend with […]. If they all end up in French waters, there is a risk of overfishing and in a few months we’ll annihilate stocks.” (paywalled link)

He and other French fishery spokesmen are quite clear on who the baddies are:

“The Dutch [M Le Prêtre] claimed were the villains of the piece. “This is a nation that is exterminating fish. They have bought up the European fleet, they fish to excess. We all know full well that if we exterminate the fish they won’t come back ever again,” (paywalled link)

He’s supported by another regional Fishery representative, M Rogoff who comes out with the warnings of punch-ups, also pointing the finger at the Dutch being the fishing villains:

“They practice what I would call a scorched-earth policy: when there is nothing left, they look elsewhere. We saw it with electric fishing. That cannot sit with our fishermen who fish locally and don’t look elsewhere when nothing’s left,” (paywalled link)

Oh dear. Of course, when our fishermen complained about this it went unheard and unreported in the MSM. Also of course our ‘green’ NGOs have been conspicuously silent about preserving our maritime environment. Forests of Wind Turbines are more ‘green’ than preserving fish stocks. Here’s more from M Rogoff:

“At the moment they fish all over the Channel, in French and English waters,” he said. But with the advent of Brexit, and no fishing deal in sight, he fears “a build-up of these giants on the French side because the English won’t let them in anymore. They have trawlers that are 30 to 40 metres long, much bigger than French boats so it creates rivalry. It will be explosive. It’ll end in a punch-up between Europeans and that’s unbearable. A political choice has to be made and it’s urgent,” (paywalled link)

Ah – but these concerns are no concerns for Macron who, for the sake of punishing us has fabricated the Brexit outcome he prefers: No Deal. There were protests by French fishermen about which we heard nothing:

“Fishermen protested in Fécamp this week with NGOs against the presence of eight massive, mainly Dutch-owned trawlers currently fishing 26 miles off the coast .[…] The boats can catch 200 tons of fish in one night – the annual catch of four small French fishing boats.” (paywalled link)

There’s more fishy stuff, demonstrating a quite remarkable ‘unity’ on fishing amongst EU member states  who, for the sake of their own ‘industries’ prefer to avoid any compromise and go along with the Paris-Brussels-Berlin axis of punishing us for voting to leave:

“Mr Rogoff said that the French government was keeping quiet about the brewing row for now so as not to rock the boat during Brexit talks. “There is strong lobbying by the Dutch towards France, which doesn’t want to fall out with their ‘allies’ over Brexit,” (paywalled link)

It gets even better, or rather, worse, if you’re a French fisherman who is being sold down the drain by his President while said President postures about his ‘concern’ for his fishermen. This is what M Rogoff told the DT next:

“The Dutch fleet relocated to Britain some time ago as we have see lots of big Dutch-owned seine boats with UK flags in recent years.Now they have started operating boats with German flags, the likes of which have not been seen in the Channel since the Second World War” (paywalled link)

Clearly that can’t be true because neither the BC nor RemainCentral reported this!  On this deadline Sunday, we learn that, thanks to Brussels intransigence, it’s not our small fishermen who’ll be the French targets but the big trawlers, owned by Dutch and other fishery conglomerates.

It looks as if the RN will indeed be needed to ‘keep the peace’. I also suspect that the remarks dropped into the discourse by Admiral Lord Alan West were a hint of things to come when he mentioned ‘marines and things’. There’s one chink of light but it remains to be seen if this will help small fishing boats, British or French, to fish in peace after Brexit, in our or in French waters:

“This week, the UK told European Commission negotiators that after Brexit, fishing boats must be majority British owned to benefit from the larger catch in UK waters.” (paywalled link)

Might a No Deal Brexit lead to a better maritime environment, to saving fish stocks, something our ‘greens’ surely must support? That would be another turn-up for the books! Perhaps our ‘green’-obsessed NGOs and BJ might think about that rather than obsess about wind farms and such, for once? 

And finally, RemainCentral has published an ‘analysis’ in which the author seems uncertain about whom to blame most, but Macron is slowly emerging as the villain of this piece, allegedly telling his EU colleagues to ‘keep pushing and the British will fold’. Over here, Cabinet and Whitehall know that a deal has now become impossible:

“Most [ministers] are expecting a call today to say that there is no point going on with the talks. The prognosis is not good. “We are totally stuck,” a Downing Street source said. Whitehall officials say the chance of a deal is now “just 20%”.” (link, paywalled)

‘20%’ – well, if today isn’t the time to finally walk away, when is it? When there’s only a ‘1% chance’ left? I hope we’ll be spared having to chew our fingernails up to our elbows  while we wait and wait  and wait for this announcement! 

 

 

KBO!

 

 

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