Cod Squad

I have just returned from 24 hours in Brussels meeting officials on fish.

The road there is now a well-worn path for folk from the North-East and the messages remain fairly mixed. But my colleague Richard Lochhead, our Shadow Fisheries Minister, and I had a new suggestion that seemed to our listeners to offer a new way forward.

With the Danes holding the EU Presidency until the end of the year it was clearly important that we heard their views. They are the biggest industrial fishing nation and have long been envied for their success at getting their way in the EU’s corridors of power. Ironic is it not that they are allowed to keep fishing for the very food eaten by cod, haddock and other white fish only to turn what they catch into pig or chicken food while we cannot catch for human consumption.

Kenn Fogtmann represents Denmark’s fish, food and agriculture interests in Brussels and is currently, along with 139 other Danes, part of the EU President’s team. With five million Danes represented by 140 staff and Scotland’s five million by less than ten, it is easy to understand why Denmark gets its own way and we are left standing at the altar time and again.

But our meeting with Kenn suggested some hope. Our ‘big idea’ is that quotas should be rolled over for 2003. The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy is to change from 1st January 2003 and it seems absurd to set quotas under the old scheme but implement them under the new.

We suggested that the ‘new CFP’ provisions for Regional Advisory Committees should be used early in 2003 to allow the nations adjacent to the North Sea fishing grounds to rapidly draw up plans for agreement by the European Commission.

All this would allow fishing communities to avoid the brutality of total closure. And vitally, it would deliver responsibility to propose a solution to the problem to those most directed affected by the success or failure of any plan – the local states and their fishermen.

While Danes indicated that they have to hold back from the debate because they hold the EU Presidency, they could see our proposal as one they could put forward to break the anticipated deadlock in discussions later this month. And it would avoid having to make two big decisions – the ‘new CFP’ and quotas – at the same Council of Ministers meeting.

So that was one team warm to our thoughts on fishing for 2003 and beyond.

Next stop seemed a harder nut to crack. She was Franz Fischler’s advisor on fishing, Maja Kirchner. I have written previously about the incongruity of a land-locked Austria being the EU state which provides the Fishing Commissioner. Meeting Maja did not initially instil confidence either. Rather than being an expert on fishing, she is a lawyer. And has been involved in fishing for only two years.

With Fischler seeming to be ‘all over the place’ in his responses to the future of North Sea fishing it was important that we understood why this was so.

One thing said by Maja soon re-emphasised the merits of our proposals.

It seems that Fischler’s office only had seven days in which to draw up their 170 page document on the future of fishing. Squeezed by the timetable for the delivery of the scientists’ reports and decision at the December Council of Ministers that was all they got.

For the first time, the real irrationality of some of the EU’s processes was brought into focus for me. And the apparent lack of knowledge on the Fishing Commissioner’s part could, to some extent at least, be put down to simple lack of time to master a complex brief.

So when we put forward our thoughts, involving as they did moving the decision into 2003, they were more warmly received than we had imagined that they would be. For it seems that Franz Fischler’s office is not unaware of the hazards of making decisions based on a rapid read of the evidence and the pressure of a ludicrously tight decision-making timetable.

And of course that timetable reduces both the chance that the recommendation is well thought out or well argued and increases the chance that it will be power politics that governs the decision rather than logic.

But the fly in the ointment was Maja’s observation that for all the good ideas that we were putting forward, they would only really carry weight if tabled by a government – preferably ours.

So that’s why our own ‘Cod Squad’, those feisty female Cod Crusaders from Fraserburgh are the ace in our hand. Pressure from outside the normal political channels alarms ministers. It worked for Peterhead Prison. It must work for our fishermen and all who depend upon them.