Fight for fair deal for our fishermen must go on after Brexit disappointment: Austin Mitchell

Remember John Major coming home from Maastricht proclaiming that he’d won “game, set and match”

We should view my fellow Brexiteers proclaiming victory in the trade negotiations in much the same way.

In fact, though, Boris Johnson’s result is a score draw as Britain enters a new era outside the auspices of the European Union.

Domestically he’s triumphed by getting the issue which has bedevilled British politics out of the way.

In trade terms he’s done his best in the face of dirty tactics by the EU, and undermining by the Remainers.

But it’s going to be hard to build a strong Britain out of his settlement.

We still have free trade in goods, but there the enormous deficit requires either protection or state aid to bring it down and we’ve got neither.

We have a surplus in services where we’ve never been particularly helped and still aren’t.

In fishing where we have a strong legal case.

Michel Barnier, who in fact negotiates for the French not the EU, has won by claiming that nothing is settled until it’s all settled which forces us to make big concessions on fishing for minimal gains in other areas.

The fact is that Ted Heath sold fishing down river in his desperate desire to get into the Common Market.

Boris hasn’t been able to win it back.

So those of us hoping for a big revival in Grimsby and the East Coast will be sadly disappointed.

Boris was probably right not to exercise the power to exclude other nations from our 200-mile limits in the way Iceland did to us in 1976.

It would have meant building gun boats, arresting French trawlers and facing disruption at the ports, all for fish we couldn’t catch because the British fishing industry has shrunk too far to do so.

It will take time and a huge investment to build it back.

But, for that, we need certainty and we haven’t got it.

In the meantime who will police the new limits?

Our four fishery protection vessels can’t be everywhere and all past experience is that fishing officers in EU Ports did nothing to enforce quotas or bans usually through fear they’d be chucked in the harbour.

Given the amiable nature of French fishermen, that threat remains.

The EU’s claim to maintain the old Common Fisheries Policy shares was both unreasonable and unjust, but with President Macron desperate not to upset his volatile fishermen, he’s come a long way to doing so.

We could have argued for exclusion from the old 12-mile limit, but the EU had already reduced that to six around England and EU vessels were already fishing our conservation areas meant for the protection of local communities.

Then there are the three imponderables to which we don’t yet know the answer.

The European Court ruled in the Factortame case that European fishing boats and companies could register as English and catch the English quota.

Can they still?

There’s an annual catch swop with Norway and most of what the Norwegians want comes from British waters.

So will the Norwegian return catch come to us or to the EU?

Finally there’s the ability to impose licence charges to foreign vessels in your waters. Many nations do this. Can we?

It’s all a sad betrayal of hope. Yet we shouldn’t give up on it.

The big catch given to the EU is for five years only.

After that there’ll be annual reviews based on the scientific advice on sustainability.

Sadly it’s a long time to wait for a fairer deal for British fishing, but we might get one then.

Austin Mitchell was Labour MP for Grimsby from 1977 until 2015.

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