Letters / Attempt to wipe out fishing communities?
During the last two decades before the turn of the century, ICES in the EU proposed the reduction of TACs of fish in EU waters; following this the UK government enforced very strict rules, regulations and controls on the types and amounts of fish UK vessels were allowed to catch and land from our own nation’s fishing grounds.
UK fishing companies and fishing vessels had their fish quotas cut so much during this time that many of them could not survive, and their vessels had to be decommissioned or sold to clear off insurmountable debts.
Coincidentally’ at that time, there happened to be a large number of EU fishing companies and vessel owners, with plenty of available finance, that were ready to buy up those UK fishing licences and fish quotas, thus allowing them to fish on UK quotas and fishing grounds.
Those vessels from the EU appear to have been exempt from investigations on their fishing activities by UK authorities, while working in our nation’s waters as their landings of fish are not subjected to the same checks as UK vessels’ fish landings.
Those EU vessels landings of closed frozen cartons of fish are never even randomly checked by our UK officialdom to see what’s in them, so our UK authorities have no idea if the markings on the boxes correspond to the size, weight and type of fish that are actually being landed directly into lorries for export to the continent.
A fleet of vast fishing vessels from various EU nations regularly fish around our nation’s coastline, one of which is a converted cargo ship which has been banned from fishing in various nation’s waters worldwide; it is presently allowed to fish freely on what used to be UK fishing grounds.
We now see ICES in the EU, again proposing massive cuts to fish quotas, which raises the following question to me.
Could this possibly be another attempt by the EU, to wipe out what’s left of our UK fishery dependent communities and fishing fleets; thus leaving all our UK fishing grounds for the exclusive use of fleets of vessels from EU nations, that have very little or no viable fishing grounds left around their home nations’ coastlines?
William Polson
Whalsay
