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Bid to restore fishing area to national control
Jason Groves
London Editor
Western Morning News
5th July 2004
A westcountry MP is to bring forward new legislation this month that would restore Britain's historic fishing grounds to national control. Anthony Steen, Conservative MP for Totnes, has secured Parliamentary time to debate the Fishery Limits (United Kingdom) Bill, which has already passed through the House of Lords.
The Bill would give the Government the authority to pull out of the European Common Fisheries Policy, re-establish Britain's 200-mile territorial waters and ban all foreign trawlers from British waters. It would also ban the controversial practice of "discards" in which fishermen are compelled to throw back perfectly good dead fish once they have reached their quota limit.
Although the Bill is opposed by the Government and has little chance of becoming law, Mr Steen said it would help to highlight the environmental and economic damage caused by the CFP. Mr Steen said the Bill would also allow the Government to take action against foreign trawlers operating in the winter bass fishery, which is widely blamed for the deaths of hundreds of dolphins off the Westcountry coast each year. At present the Government is powerless to act against the French-dominated fishery without the agreement of other EU states.
Mr Steen said: "We should renegotiate with the other member states and get out of the CFP. I am not coming at this from an anti-European point of view - it is a question of conservation and the environment.
"I am in favour of anything in Europe that benefits Britain - I am not one of those extreme supporters of a view that we should have nothing to do with them. The CFP has clearly not benefited Britain and I do not see any reason why, after 30 years, we should not renegotiate certain things that are not in our interests. It is totally immoral that we throw more fish overboard dead than we land. And it is crazy that we can do nothing about the killing of dolphins in our waters.
"The CFP does not work and the fish we are talking about are mostly in our former territorial waters. We have got to push to get things sorted out."
The question of whether or not to withdraw from the CFP is one of the most contentious in the fishing industry. The South West Fish Producers Organisation, which favours the move, recently split from the national organisation over the issue.
The Conservatives have pledged to pull out of the CFP, with Tory leader Michael Howard even promising to act unilaterally if other EU states refuse to agree - a move that has alarmed some within his own party.
But the Government and the Lib-Dems both oppose the move, saying that pulling out of the CFP would be virtually impossible without pulling out of the EU entirely, and that it would not resolve the fundamental problems facing the industry.
Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw accused the Conservatives of "abdicating their responsibility to engage with the reality and find practical solutions to the challenges the fishing industry faces."
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