Lovely Lydia and the Matelot - Fish and Brexit
Tuesday 1st December 2020
Lydia: Good morning. Good morning. 'Tis us this morning, and it is time, it is time after four years to finally talk about Brexit and fish. I have avoided this topic for the past four years because it can get horribly detailed, but we're going to keep it, we're going to keep it high level this morning. And we really are down to the wire on the Brexit negotiations. And it is possible that we will have a deal within the next couple of weeks.
And one of the big outstanding topics has been fish. And so fish is what we are going to talk about this morning. Let's just go over our particular credentials when it comes to fish. Darling, would you like to tell us your fishing background?
Matelot: Starting when I was five... no. I was in the Fishery Protection Squadron in the Navy as a junior officer. That's where you learned ship handling and other things and. Currently, I'm the chairman of the Orford and District Inshore Fishermen's Association, fighting for their rights in the in the North Sea.
Lydia: So what era were you in Fishery Protection?
Matelot: I was in Fishery Protection in the late 70s, early 80s.
Lydia: Late 70s. So remember, we joined the EU in 1973. So you were there when the CFP was in action?
Matelot: Yeah
Lydia: And does it still exist? Fishery Protection?
Matelot: Oh, yes. Yes.
Lydia: So we're still boarding ships and so on to check fishing stocks, like you did.
Matelot: Absolutely. Yeah. Checking, you know, the technical aspects, like Blinders in the nets where you have a smaller mesh size. So, you don't let juvenile fish get out the net, right the way through to areas where they're not allowed to fish or checking quotas and so on.
Lydia: So the Navy, the Royal Navy is still policing fishing in British waters.
Matelot Very much so.Very much so.
Lydia: OK. My personal experience was when I worked in the EU, I worked on the what they call the Coreper One side, which is the negotiation area that includes agriculture and fishing, and so was
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coordinating briefs for fishing councils and so on. And I, my boss, who had worked in fish and agriculture all his life, you know, fish was always the "Oh God!" subject that just went on and on and on. And it's it's it's a political red herring in lots of ways.
It's one of those where the impact... The actual impact is actually quite small. But the political impact is enormous, which is why it is such a big issue now so just to regroup as to where we are now. As I said, we're coming into the very last stages where we can actually negotiate a deal with the EU before the end of the transition period, which will come into effect on 1st of January. And and fishing. Yeah. So going back when we joined the EU in 1973, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was already in place and it had been stitched up literally by the then six European Community members before the UK joined.
And it's probably fair to say that the CFP, as it is called, and that's often blamed for bringing the fishing industry in the UK down. However, in 1973, the fishing industry was already depleted and then the CFP didn't do anything to help. That's my understanding anyway.
Matelot: Yeah, I think that.. you know fishing was easy centuries ago where all the fishing boats were either propelled by oar or sail and they didn't really go far off the coast. It was with the invention of the steam engine or trawlers with steam engines went a long, you know, further afield in the 19th century. And it started all to get a little bit pear shaped because people started having to protect their own waters.
Lydia: Yes. And, you know, we start looking at fishing on an industrial scale, which is something that we're now dealing with.
And what is key with regard to Brexit specifically is that the fishing industry in the UK accounts for 0.01 percent of our overall GDP. It's a slightly higher percentage if you just look at Scotland, but all across the UK, 0.01 percent. And yet it was one of the really big aspects of the Brexit campaign, the campaign to leave, because the rhetoric is very much about 'taking back control of our waters'. It's about sovereignty. Do you agree?
Matelot: Yeah, I think it's 0.1 percent rather than 0.01 percent, but can discuss.
Lydia: Well, we'll check that. It's very very low. It's economically peanuts, but it's politically explosive.
Matelot: But we all love the fishermen... fisher people.. if you put your mind back to the campaign, running up to the, the referendum, when people heard that, you know, "and we will take back our fishing areas.
We'll take back our sovereignty over the seas around around the UK and so on. that's what people remember. they don't actually remember very much about, you know, fiscal studies or anything like that. They remember fishing because it's know it's something which you can grab hold of. And I think in a way that the the government's got itself in a position now where they think they would love to let that go, but they can't because it's the one thing which people really rather remember.
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and feel rather romantically attached to this "this island, island race, island nation" sovereignty of the seas and so on.
Lydia: Yeah, exactly. You know, rule the waves, et cetera. But as as an issue for the EU it's one of those where it's incredibly important to the EU, but specifically to the countries that have coast that borders onto onto UK waters or close to. So the main actors are France, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark .
Belgium, and it's all about sharing waters that when we joined the EU and signed up to the CFP, all of that had been portioned out. So we didn't get an awful lot of the quota. And I believe there was a figure kind of bandied around the other day that in the channel, the UK fishes, I think it's about nine percent of the Cod stocks in the channel and the French fish about 84 percent.
Now, you can put that figure out there. And politically, that's huge because you go, "oh, my God, do you know that this is a shared piece of water and yet the French are taking more of the cod than than we are. How does that work?"
However, that says a lot about the size of the French fleet compared to our fleet. It also goes to the fact that the French built the CFP even before the UK came in. So of course, they were going to leave us out. And plus, 70 percent of the fish and shellfish caught in the UK waters, or caught by UK fishing vessels, sorry, is then sold to the EU. We are, we are talking about altering a system to take back more control of an industry that we will then inevitably sell most of back to the EU, which is part of the problem.
Matelot: Yeah, another problem is that people tend to imagine that the English Channel, because we call it the English Channel, the French call it La Manche, you know, people think that the English Channel belongs to the UK and therefore what right have the French got to fish? But of course the median line goes down the center of the channel and the cod don't understand where that median line is.
Lydia: No, they don't.
Matelot: And so the little devils, they don't want to put themselves 50/50 either side when they're doing their migration because cod migrate from the... In the North Sea here, they tend to come north to the North Sea, when the temperatures are cooler and then they all migrate south again when the temperatures go up.
And one of the reasons we're losing cold in the North Sea is because the North Sea temperature doesn't go down as much as it used to. But of course, the French, if the cod migratory route is on the southern side of the channel, then if you've got a strict median line, then British fleets could dip out on cod.
Lydia: Yeah. And what we're not going to go into too much detail about what they're actually negotiating on fish. But what they're broadly trying to say is at the moment, the CFP gives a quota to each country that they're allowed to fish, a tonnage of different types of fish. I think about 100 different types that are
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mentioned in the CFP. so not just called cod, you know, whiting, haddock, the whole lot. And that quota is seen as unfair to the UK and what the UK want instead are fishing zones where they basically say, "right, this is our patch, I'm going to fish our patch."
And then, of course, that that has difficulty over, you know, fish migrating. But we have recently signed a deal with Norway specifically, which has another factor in it that the UK wants, which is an annual re negotiation on fishing quotas. And that could be better for fish stocks because you kind of look at how much fish is in the sea and then say, "right, we've got a portion from that". And the EU don't really want to consider that.
And they have been really hard line on it. And in fact, Michel Barnier said in September that there was 'no deal with the EU that does not have an agreement on fishing', which is really politically enormous when you think it's actually such a small economic issue.
Matelot: Yeah, and of course, it is complex, you know, very complex, even though it is a tiny percentage of GDP in that some of the UK quota, for example, is actually owned by a company which runs a Norwegian super trawler.
And so that Norwegian super trawler scoops everything up. It is remarkably efficient at scouring the seabed, which is not good for the seabed itself and makes our smaller industry in the North Sea pale into insignificance. But the fact is that actually it's using a UK quota.
Lydia: Yes, which is ironic, really, but also just to go back a step, in that, you know, the said at the beginning of this that the UK fishing industry was already declining by the time that we joined the EU and that the CFP has definitely done nothing to improve that.
I think one of the things that my boss always said when we were in Brussels was that one of the problems with renegotiating the CFP, was that you were always going to be renegotiating with the same characters that already had their vested interests. And so you would always be fighting over the same stuff over and over again, and that the CFP was the closest you could get to an agreement and it had been in existence for, you know, since the 70s.
And therefore, it was so well-established, it was very difficult to then break out the mindset to do something different. And so, I mean, that's partly why we're at loggerheads, but as I said before, that this is a political red herring because this is such a tiny part of everyone's economy, including France, including Spain and so on (even though it's more important to them and they eat an awful lot more fish than we do)
The issue comes down to control over territory and establishing control over territory and if the EU deal fails because of fish it's almost like it's a political totem that is being felled because if everything else is agreed and then we go "actually we don't really want a deal in the end, then we can blame fish as a way of saying this was an intractable issue and we couldn't overcome it."
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Matelot: And that goes back to my point about people remembering who voted to leave the EU, remembering the point about "we will take back our seas" and if we can't take back our seas then there's no deal.
Lydia: Yeah, exactly.
Matelot: As you say, it's an easy out. I love your red herring bit
Lydia: Thanks (wink)
Matelot: Love the way you did that. But none of this is new really. I mean, in the 70s, we 76, 75, 76, we had the Cod War. I say the Cod War, it was a very strange war, wasn't really a war because not one shot was fired and was never going to be. But we had some very dangerous activities between Royal Naval ships totally unsuited to the role, fighting against, I say "fighting", trying to move out the way, using their bows and so on
Icelandic gunboats (even thought they never fired guns) trying to cut the warps of fishing vessels and that, alright that was because the Icelandic had extended 200 miles and we we had a big cod fishing fleet which used to go up there. But that got very political, so much so that NATO got involved. NATO got involved in resolving the issue because the Icelandics said, well, we'll get rid of NATO from Keflavik, get all the aircraft out. And of course, in those days, Cold War, we needed our air base in Iceland.
And even the coast of East Africa. Some of the states that got involved because they supported the Icelandics, because they said this is just another example of imperialism and colonialism. So, you know, fish do and fishing do a remarkably political effect.
Lydia: Well, the probably the biggest political effect fishing has had recently has been in Somalia and piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa.
Matelot: Yes, yes.
Lydia: It's was a major issue. rather caused by the Spanish fishing off Somalia. Do you just give us a little insight on that because you were involved in that?
Matelot: Yeah, I mean, the simple story is that the fishing grounds of Somalia, which used to be very rich, were overfished by EU countries, mainly Spain, such that the Somalian fishermen had no fish to catch. So they went to piracy instead. Which caused huge issues. And then the EU had to go back in to counter the piracy.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it is a big deal, but it's not the deal that you maybe think. So when it comes down to it in the next next few weeks, whatever comes out, in a way has less to do with fishing
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and more to do with the optics of creating a political agreement. One of the things we've always said when it comes to any negotiation is that the effective way to reach an outcome is to allow your opposite number to walk away from the deal with their head held high and to go back to that parliament and say, "we got a deal.
We're happy with. it's great. It's absolutely fantastic". And allowing 'an out' where that person can then walk away is the key thing. So whatever happens with fish, in a way, it's not that significant. The significant thing is a deal has been reached and they are prepared to put fishing off to one side. If we do not have a deal at the end of the day, then fishing may well be used as the totem to say" we couldn't agree on this.
There are red lines all over the place. We're not going anywhere". So that that's going to be the key thing to watch out for. And as a special treat at the end of this..
I've just a couple of questions to answer there, but I thought we'd have a little story from the Matelot.... Maybe one of your Fishery protection stories? There's quick question Els asked here, one of which was, "is the fishing industry really viable without subsidies going forward?
I haven't really heard anything specific about subsidies for the UK fishing industry going forward. But obviously subsidies has been quite significant up to now?
Matelot: i don't think there's that many subsidies for the fishing industry actually.
Lydia:; Much more in farming
Matelot: much more in, farming. I mean, they do nice things like the EU provided lifejackets for every single fisherman in the UK and all the other EU fishing community to try and encourage the lads to wear lifejackets, whether it's a sensible things like that.
Lydia: Yeah, but a lot of the CFP rules have been very kind of arcane and, you know, change quickly on a lot of things. I mean, what is possibly significant is that pretty much 100 percent of fisher people in UK voted to leave the EU. And fishermen that we've spoken to have said "the thing is that the UK population isn't used to change, but fishermen are used to change because it changes for us all the time. The rules change constantly." In fact, there was a story of a fisherman that you know, that he was at sea with with ..Who was it?
Matelot: It was IFCA.
Lydia: IFCA?
Matelot: the Internal Fisheries Control Authority.
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Lydia: OK. So he's at sea with the IFCA authorities fishing seabass and he caught the sea bass and they were like, "oh, right.
That's not allowed". and he's like, "OK, is it this rule or is it this rule? And you need to tell me now otherwise, you know, I either have to throw this back or I keep it on board". And they basically said, "we don't know. But whatever you do, we're going to arrest you." which is pretty much how it happened?
Matelot: yeah, but he caught it all on camera, so that was very, very good. Yes, but it ended up almost going to court. and this is a chap you must interview.
Lydia: Yeah, I really want to interview James that is something I want to do. So just I'm just checking quickly for questions. And so Els is also saying "won't it all come down to the EU getting fishing rights in return for access to the City and financial markets?"
in terms of quid pro quo, there's certainly a lot of talk about, you know, trade offs. The actual trade off I read about was whether the EU would actually swap electricity rights to the internal market so the UK could access into, the single market sorry, for electricity in return for basically shutting up about fishing. So I read that- specific to electricity rather than the city. I think the city stuff is quite largely sewn up already, but obviously we don't know that in a lot of the detail.
But from what I understand from people who are negotiating is that we have actually done quite a lot of work. We are literally down to a couple of of issues now. And so a lot will come out when when it does basically.
So, yeah, we will pull this to a close. But if you'd like to tell us a little story about fishery protection. I think we'd all enjoy that.
Matelot: Yes remembering that it is before the watershed. Some of you might remember, BBC Radio four used to start with a theme called the UK theme as it flashed up at twenty past 6:00 in the morning. Sorry 20 past 5:00 in the morning. And it had little dits like "what do we do with a drunken sailor" and" rule Britannia" and all these classics and when we were at sea with a fishing fleet
If that fishing fleet was maybe French.. We had a very clever radio system on board, which no matter what frequency the fishing fleet were transmitting, we could pick it up. We would just follow it down round the various channels. And so we used to play the radio four theme on the VHF radio, and the French would say "Zut Alors! And they would chop to "channel Dix" and we would go straight to channel dix as well and keep on playing it. And they used to get really quite annoyed, I must admit. But it was good fun
Lydia: and it sounds like it was quite, sort of, high tension at times. you were boarding ships..
Matelot: Well, we were we were in some of the boarding were quite fun because we had some really bad outboard motors on our little rubber craft. And there was one famous one where our boarding team.. I
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was on I was the Officer of the Watch on the ship, HMS Orkney and we were somewhere north of the Shetlands and it was quite rough. And the little boat, our little boat stopped halfway between us and the trawler.
Lydia: That's not what you want.
Matelot: No. And the trawler you very kindly called me up and said "HMS Orkney this is ... I can't remember the name of the ship, but this is the ship Clemenceau. Would you like me to come alongside you a bit?" And I said "Tha would be rather good of you thank if you would you." And that's what he did, he came alongside our boarding team.
Lydia: Oh that's nice. I mean, Rules of the Sea you can't leave people in peril.
Matelot: Yeah. Then there's another time when me and my fellow boarding officer Shuggy, we rolled on board.. and I think it was a German fishing boat, doesn't matter and it was quite a difficult boarding and they hadn't really noticed us, which was quite fun. And and so in our big orange survival suits Shuggy and I came barrelling over the side of the fishing boat and were attacked by an Alsatian dog which started chasing us round the deck. Much to of the amusement of the crew didn't actually realise we were on board until the dog started barking
Lydia: Well, there you are. what great fun you had back in those days. So and that is it's on fish. We didn't go into detail, which was what we tried not to do. we finally talked about fish. And the main thing being that whatever deal we end up with, if we end up with a deal, they might well have side-lined fish and the fishermen and fishermen and women.
And if we don't get a deal, then fish will probably be held up as one the reasons we didn't get.
Matelot Or they say, "well, we can't agree on fish at the moment, we've agreed everything else. We will continue to discuss fish."
That is a possibility that has been talked about. You basically take fish out of the equation. Although that will be going back and what Barnier said in September and I have heard that quite a few are keen he holds that red line. Yeah, but we'll see. I mean, basically all things are red lines until they're no longer red lines. So we take that with a pinch of salt that is all.
That was our Red herring story. Thank you for joining us. And a transcript will be available as soon as possible.
Thanks, guys. Bye