Your regular concern for the fishing fleets of the world is touching.
- Fishing fleets are down in most places, not just the UK: overfishing for centuries, bigger boats, technology...
- Fishing is a fraction of a percent of British economic output*, and I would have thought Global Britain would have, erm, better things to do. Such as develop exports of goods and services it is really good at.
- All trade deals are a negotiation, where concessions get exchanged, bits of sovereignty swapped, etc. Presumably this is what Heath was on to, and Thatcher (of Single Market fame), Major, Blair and others. Considering Britain's economic development in the 80s, 90s and early 00s, it wasn't such a bad idea.
- You forget to mention, for some reason, the inconvenient fact that a good part of the reduction of the British fishing fleet in recent decades was caused by British owners selling their fishing rights to Dutch, Danish and other EU companies.
As for the non-fishy part of your post:
- Your consent for Maastricht etc. was assumed, as the MPs you voted for (assuming you voted Conservative) supported these treaties with their votes in Parliament. Isn't that how Britain's fine parliamentary democracy is supposed to work?
- Trade with the rest of the world "slung away": how do you explain that Germany now sells 15 times more goods to India than the UK? Even mighty Belgium sells more there, and France about the same. Did Ted Heath hand over the catalogues, price lists, and secret blueprints for Bedford lorries?
*and as said by others, a high percentage of British seafood is sold to the EU already. Where else would Global Britain rather sell it?
Thank you for the somewhat patriarchal, nay characteristically patronising, lecture, Prof. Its a shame that you spoiled the mood by succumbing to the temptation ('concern for fishing fleets etc') to be snide, but never mind, I'll join the party; love the bullet points. Thank the Lord that pfm doesn't accommodate PowerPoint presentations.
Your first two and final bullet points I'm fully aware of, but thank you.
Trade deals aren't concessions where vast tracts of sovereignty go in one direction only. As far as I'm aware no other country on earth submits its national waters to another entity, to take just one, topical, example.
The EU Treaties anyway have nothing in common with mere trade deals. Consent for Maastricht was certainly assumed, and quite wrongly, which is why it was fought so bitterly both without, and within Parliament, where a petulant PM threatened to resign if his party didn't follow him.
Maastricht was part 1 of a handover of sovereignty so substantial as to break the entire concept of Parliamentary democracy, handing vast tracts of UK competences to an unaccountable and fundamentally undemocratic set of institutions in Brussels. Lisbon was part 2, the split between two time-separated Treaties being because the EU knew darn well that what they were doing would be unacceptable to the European electorates and they would never have got it through in one hit. As it was they had to play dirty to get Lisbon through, the initial draft Constitution having been rejected by two European electorates, and the Lisbon treaty itself by another, and Gordon Brown was so ashamed of putting his signature to it that he refused to do so in front of the cameras, allegedly secreting himself in a janitors cupboard in the magnificent Jerónimos Monastery, after all the other dignitaries had gone to lunch.
So substantial a break with the Parliamentary tradition were the two treaties that they should have been put to a plebiscite, because they fundamentally broke the historic and hard won constitutional link between the electorate and the elected, whereby power is vested in the Crown-in-Parliament by the people.
On your final point, when I referred to Britain's substantial trade with the rest of the world I was referring as much to old friends that were well and truly fecked over when we went into the EEC. Germany's substantial success as an exporter is another subject entirely, but suffice it to say that it has been leveraged by that country's highly focussed mercantilism, in which it has ruthlessly gamed its position in the EU, and specifically the Euro, at the very considerable expense of the Southern European economies.
To return to your little bit of snidery at the beginning, my concern is not for the 'world's fishing fleets', and it is disingenuous and without foundation for you to say so. Fishing is a disproportionately powerful lobby within the EU (and I include historically in that the UK's NFFO), which extracts well over £1bn a year in EU subsidies in order to maintain an industry at somewhere around 3 times sustainable capacity, and which would otherwise run at a loss. In close to a dozen countries the value of the subsidy actually exceeds the value of the catch. In a reversal of earlier policy, a high proportion of this subsidy is directed towards larger and more damaging vessels of over 24 metres, and in modernising older vessels to make them yet more efficient. In setting annual quotas the EU routinely ignores the scientific advice which it itself commissions. The net result is that European waters have suffered years of overfishing. In large parts of the med there are no longer any fish at all, with, for example, stocks of anchovies in the Western med disappearing. Following a period of recovery, cod stocks in the North Sea are now once more endangered, and so on.
As a result of this, EU fleets are now having to go much further to find fish. To this end the EU subsidises a fleet of, if my memory serves me right, 32 factory ships which ply the coast of west Africa. In order to buy off the governments whose territorial rights extend into those waters, the EU has hosed over €1bn over a decade into those countries in order to ameliorate the damage to the subsidence fisheries and processing industries in those coastal regions. I'll leave it to you to guess whether any of that cash ever actually reaches the affected communities.
These EU fleets also extend their operations into the Indian Ocean in pursuit of tuna, which is as a result rapidly becoming depleted, again affecting small scale fishing industries there.
I'm sorry if this offends your (and TheDecameron's) sensibilities as regards 'faux' concern for the 'poor African farmer', or in this case, fisher, and I understand that you yourselves couldn't give a shit provided that all is cosy as regards the good old EU, in an I'm alright Jackass kind of way, but there it is. The CFP, formerly with and now without the UK's input, is an outrage, and Boris's grubby little deal with the EU allows it to continue to extend its destructive reach into UK waters.
Sorry, another long post, but I can't stand being patronised.
