After months of fighting over fishing rights, the French coast guard forced a British mussel cutter to land in Le Havre on Thursday night. Another boat was cautioned. From next week on, not only will the controls be tightened, but ports will also be closed to British cutters, Paris announced. London’s Fisheries Minister George Eustice called the measures “disappointing and disproportionate”.
The catch quotas in the species-rich waters of the North Atlantic and North Sea have been one of the most controversial issues in the Brexit negotiations until recently. The compromise before the final exit from the internal market and customs union at the beginning of the year was: The EU fishermen are gradually giving up a quarter of the value of their previous catches in British waters over five and a half years.
In addition, they have to apply for licenses annually in London and the partially autonomous Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey so that they can continue to work in the twelve nautical mile zone. Conversely, British fishermen are given access to the mussel beds off France. The individual boats had to prove that they had been active in the canal for several years.
In the past few months, complaints from Paris have become louder and louder that the British are not sticking to the agreement. While London claims that 98 percent of the permits applied for have already been granted, the French Fisheries Minister Annick Girardin speaks of a “wrong number”: around ten percent of the licenses are missing, “and of course it’s about French boats”.
Government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday that Paris will not allow London to “trample on the Brexit agreement”. From next week on, controls on goods traffic between the two countries are to be tightened in addition to fishing. The words were followed by deeds on the same day, and the ship “Cornelis Gert Jan” has been moored in Le Havre ever since.
At freezing point
Apparently the coastguard crew could not prove their actually existing license to fish in French waters, reported Juliette Hatchman from the professional association SWFPO of the BBC. The cutter is owned by the Scottish company Macduff Shellfish; its managing director Andrew Brown described his boat as a “pawn” in the dispute between the neighbors.
In fact, the Franco-British relationship is currently stuck near freezing. At the end of last year, Prime Minister Boris Johnson resented French President Emmanuel Macron for having the border temporarily closed in the middle of the corona pandemic due to the highly infectious Delta variant and thus causing truck beating for kilometers in front of the English canal ports.
Conversely, the Aukus security agreement between the USA, Australia and Great Britain continues to cause outrage in Paris. Paris feels betrayed.
In the fisheries dispute, Paris believes that it has more leverage. In fact, the 8,000 professional fishermen on the island and the coastal communities where they are based remain heavily reliant on trade with the continent. Of the approximately 450,000 tonnes of fish they land annually, 70 percent have so far been exported to the EU either fresh or canned, almost half of them to France.
The trade obstacles created by Brexit have already severely disrupted the lucrative business. Tougher controls at the eye of the needle between Dover and Calais could kill him.
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