Brexitwatch: broken promise no 6 - fishing

During the referendum campaign, UKIP’s Nigel Farage led a few fishing boats up the Thames to protest against the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy while another leading Brexiter, ‘Mike the knife’ Gove blamed it for the destruction of his father’s business. Leave campaigners told fishermen that once we left Europe, foreigners could be excluded from British waters, and all their troubles would be over.

Sadly, it was just another broken Brexit promise. The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations has warned that because the UK is so close to Europe, it will not be possible to shut out other nations in the way that Iceland, for example, has done.

Instead we will have to negotiate with our neighbours – a process that will almost certainly take years, with no guarantee that quotas will end up being any more generous than they are now, especially as they will still have to be tight enough to stop the suicidal overfishing the CFP was designed to prevent.

The only certain outcome of leaving the EU will be that fishermen will lose the subsidies they currently get from Europe.

 As with so many things that were blamed on the EU, much of the discontent stirred up by the CFP was actually the result of a decision by the UK government - to allocate two-thirds of our quotas to just three big companies, freezing out many smaller fishermen.

Ghost boats of the Sea of Japan

At regular intervals, ghost ships, or more precisely ghost boats about 30 feet long appear in the Sea of Japan. Last November alone, 13 were found drifting, deserted except for dead bodies – a total of 26, many of them already largely decomposed.

There are indications that they are from North Korea – a handwritten sign in one saying it belonged to a unit of the North Korean army, the tattered remains of a national flag, the boats’ dilapidated condition and the lack of equipment.

Were they carrying defectors? Apparently some of those who escaped the closed, repressive regime in the past arrived in such vessels. Or were they fishermen under pressure from their fanatical Communist government to get bigger catches, who strayed too far out to sea?

The last explanation would fit with the regime’s desperation to conceal the scale of North Korea’s dreadful food shortage. In spite of aid from abroad, there has been little improvement in production since the mass starvation of the early 2000s.

*For more on North Korea's famines, see A Disastrous History of the World.