Fishing industry is being traded away
For many years now our members at Fishing Forward UK have witnessed the intransigence of our SNP government to protect our fishing industry and remote fishing communities.
The fishing industry that our remote islands and communities were largely built on has been stolen from them by our governments uncaring attitude towards an infinite food producing industry, if managed properly.
Fishing Forward UK represents many communities the length of the UK, with fishermen, ex-fishermen and support companies giving their time to provide information and data that our governments could freely use. But they choose to treat the industry as a pariah to be traded away for some unseen benefit.
Our Marine Directorate in Edinburgh and the MMO in Newcastle and DEFRA have beenrepeatedly told of our concerns and the failures of the monitoring system they are operating, with no secondary system of verification if landing declarations from non-UK owned vessels are accurate or not.
The economic link these non-UK owned vessels should be operating under to our respective governments is frankly a shambles and is resulting in our fleets missing out on many millions worth of fish that our government should be clawing back from these vessels.
We at Fishing Forward UK have done thousands of hours research into this, but if you ask for data under a FOI request we are told it’s “not in the public interest” to divulge this information.
Recently we have submitted our concerns to our newly elected SNP MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad, thinking that she may have some respect for our genuine concerns of fish being transhipped in our northern Scottish ports in unlabelled boxes and unrecorded tonnages.
Ms Goodlad has yet to reply to any of our concerns, so in true SNP style it is swept under the carpet once more.
So in summary the fishing industry has been stolen with no local control and the race to fill our once pristine fishing waters with polluting windmills and the damage seabed cables do to fish spawn, crabs and whales’ navigation systems is ignored.
Alastair Inkster
Fishing Forward UK chairman
Scalloway
