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The Kirkella, Britain’s last distant-water whitefish trawler, is currently tied up in port and unable to work due to a glitch in the Brexit.
During the UK’s debate over leaving the European Union, fishing was held up as an example of what Britain stood to gain outside of the bloc and the limitations it faced within it.
Despite the industry’s diminutive size – in 2021, the sector contributed around 0.03 percent of the U.K.’s economic output – it drove a significant part of the public debate.
Michael Gove, whose father ran a fishing company in Scotland, held up the industry as Brexit’s raison d’être, while a few days before the vote, Nigel Farage led a flotilla of fishing boats displaying anti-EU banners up the River Thames.
More than nine in 10 fishermen intended to vote Leave in June 2016, believing they were on the verge of taking back control of UK waters.
But alas, it appears that the industry has been sold down the river.
The Kirkella, which was once one of three vessels operated from the UK that would bring home around 20,000 tonnes of whitefish (mostly cod and haddock for our chippies) each year from off the Norwegian coast, is currently tied up with no quota left to fish.
This year, Kirkella has been limited to catching around 6,500 tonnes, with the shortfall being imported from countries like Norway, Greenland, Iceland and even Russia.
Writing in the Yorkshire Post, Jane Sandell, the CEO of UK Fisheries, points out that pre-2019, the UK was able to trade off the fact that Norway was offered important trade concessions by the EU on our behalf.
But since then, a succession of fisheries ministers simply failed to instruct their negotiating teams at Defra to deliver the same result for Britain in fisheries talks with our partners around the North Sea as the much-maligned Common Fisheries Policy achieved prior to Brexit.
“In short, Brussels negotiators did a far better job for Britain than we have since done for ourselves.”
