Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website
while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of
Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government,
Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different
relationship with the EU. Here is the fourth of several abridged extracts of the
book, still using imaginary characters, which shows . The third extract was published this morning.
Jim Thomson is rightly proud of his new thirty footer. Riding high in the dockside at Peterhead, the Annie is the newest addition to the Scottish inshore fishing fleet. Along with two other recently built vessels in the harbour, it symbolises the recovery of the industry today in 2020, after a period of forty years of decline.
Back in 1970, there had been 21,443 fishermen in the UK, with around one in seven of the workforce working part time. By the time of Britain’s EU renegotiations in 2010, there were just over 12,000.
Four in ten jobs at sea had been lost. But the pain was far more widespread, because for every sea-going job there were ten sustained on land maintaining the boats and processing what they caught. All told, accepting and implementing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) had cost British coastal communities 115,000 jobs.
However, as Jim tells it, ‘As soon as we stopped being in the CFP, DEFRA immediately banned all dumping of fish at sea. That change had an immediate economic effect, because £130 million of fish that would otherwise have been dumped at sea now was landed. This was just the initial one-off bonanza, though. We brought a new system into play involving the ‘carry over’ of quota, negotiated at local community level. Where boats caught more than they were supposed to over the course of the season – and that was typically accidentally, as a result of fishing for other species – the catch would still be landed, weighed in order to add to the scientific understanding of the stocks, sold, and then reduced from the allowed catch limit for the following year.
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