Extending the agreement by another 12 years with nothing tangible in return, is a disgraceful betrayal of the UK’s fishermen, but unfortunately, it is not the first, as we belatedly discovered in 2000 under the 30 year rule.
With the release of Government papers under this rule, we now know that Geoffrey Rippon, fisheries minister at the time, told the treacherous Ted Heath, Tory Prime Minister at the time, "If we want to enter the EEC (as it was then known) under the terms stated by General De Gaulle, we will have to sacrifice Britain’s fishermen, which is exactly what he did.
The Common Fisheries policy was hastily introduced by the original 6 members at the instigation of France, at the time that Britain was negotiating membership. It was a simple ploy by the members states to give all members equal fishing rights to UK territorial waters, reducing the protection zone of our fishermen’s rights to 12 miles from the coastline from its previous 200.
It also introduced an absurd quota system that has not only seen millions upon millions of fish thrown back into the sea for gulls to feed on, but has resulted in our fishing industry, that was the largest in all of Europe, being completely decimated, leaving huge unemployment and poverty in towns like Hull and Grimsby, the latter once being the largest fishing port in the world.
This is yet another sad betrayal of the UK’s fishermen, and the irony of the UK being an island nation, surrounded by bountiful supplies of fish should not be lost on anyone.