Will the Captain be going down, too?
The slowest-moving disaster movie ever made continues. Brexit is still not a done deal. Or no deal. The game show from hell that debuted in 2016 is finally, hopefully reaching the end of its long-overdue last season. It would be so good if the principal players in this over-hyped fiasco would now just piss off back to their fortunes and stop playing at government: to echo the words of the man who precipitated this whole shitshow; "...for God's sake man, just go!": Cameron's words to Corbyn during PMQ's sometime in antiquity.
One of the ironies of the whole wrangle currently taxing our bear-of-little-brain and the understandably-terminally-frustrated EU negotiating team is fishing. In economic terms, fishing is a very small, well, fish in the sea of European economic activity, so far as both the UK and the EU are concerned. But the historical resonances abound: a once great, seafaring island nation; the Cod Wars, und-so-weiter.
One thing's for certain, we need to leave the bloody sea alone and let its native species recover from the rapacity of the human race. Never mind the fact that most of the stuff caught by British fleets in recent decades has ended up on the European market, where the taste for seafood is both avid and catholic, unlike the UK, which largely doesn't eat the stuff: most people's concept of seafood is fish and chips.
That we are still cleaving to this shibboleth says more about nationalism than the pragmatics and common-sense of the realpolitik. My belief is that the underlying motive behind the Tory High Command's approach to Brexit all along has been essentially venal: hiding behind a smokescreen of spurious patriotism just exposes them for the scoundrels they truly are.
As a diver and sailor I've seen the devastation that the EU's dreadful fishing "policies" have caused to both our sea beds and fishing communities. I spent my 21st birthday in Coverack on the Lizard Penninsula (Cornwall) with the fishermen who were also the lifeboatmen. When I returned to Cornwall their vibrant commmunity was decimated and the Lifeboat station a twee little eatery. You're right about the British obsession with fish and chips but the problem is with the wholesaling and distribution of fish AND the timidity of Chippy owners to experiment: After a hard days sailing and salvage diving one day we returned to Newlyn, where we'd seen the night's plentiful catch being unloaded from the 30 to 40ft boats that filled the harbour, we just wanted fish & chips but the chippy oposite the harbour had no fish! It had ALL gone up to Billingsgate where ALL British fish was then auctioned and distributed from. I came up against this "secure supply" connundrum when we caught a couple of smashing little lobsters in Brighton. I wanted to sell them to Wheelers in the Lanes in Brighton where I could only dream of affording a meal but they were in trepidation of upsetting their regular suppliers by buying our two lobsters! So local fresh lobsters were NOT on the menu of the most expensive restaurant in Brighton!! When I started canoeing in Brighton in the early sixties our canoe club was in an arch under the main seafront road and in front of it was the "Hard" where the days catch was auctioned daily. My father's dream of retirement was to build boats on Brighton beach and catch the fish that were so plentiful in the local seas (he told me that when the Mackeral shoaled you could "walk on them"!!! Remember the photo in the Vaynol, Pentir that I added up the weights of all the salmon caught in ONE tide in ONE fish trap on the Menai Straights and it came to three quarters of a TON!! Our midless mechanization and wanton ignoring of science, I met one of the first science officers for fish protection in Suffolk over drinks and he told me that THEY needed the protection from the big trawlermen!!
ReplyDeleteI had to break off there because that amount of typing raped 70% of my MBP's battery!!! Another thread that I'll regale you with over dwinkis in T' Arms this afternoon after I've picked up MORE Cannon camera bodies and bits from my mate Patrick!!
DeleteRegarding our environment: it can support a wealth of fish but NOT IF industrial fishing is left rampant cf the Dust Bowl and multiple other examples of man overiding nature.
The point that I was getting to about the EU (yes there IS a point!!) is that the "throw-away" deal done to get us into the EU (Our brainless money obsessed politicians wanted ALL the brakes taken off the "City" that IF Capitalism works should NOT need ANY governmental support or favourable terms cos it holds the "Masters of the Universe" how many bailouts for the banks can YOU remember folks??) that has resulted in support for ONLY bigger and bigger trawlers and institutionalized overfishing! Proof: ONE 80+meter Dutch trwaler has 80% of the North Sea Cod quota and can hoover this (along with fuck knows how much by-catch!!) in a week and the week after that is off West Africa raping THEIR fish stocks! Second proof: t' EU "negotiators" are now holding out for a fishing status quo for a DECADE during which the institutionalized overfishing will continue! The way that ALL EU negotiatios are conducted is parallel to sleep-depravation torture techniques vis drag out the "negotiations" overnight and to the LAST minute to then suddenly announce agreement that the public swallow along with the Bullshit that the negotiations were open and are the BEST that could be made! This, in the caseof fishing, means that the quota system carries on regardless of OUR scientific research that identifies fish stocks at risk and stocks that OUR fishermen have been husbanding being "set upon" by mainland EU trawlers and YEARS of REAL conservation is just spunked away for short-term profits!
IF you don't believe me just watch the pantomime being enacted by Boris and von der Leyen: it will go to "the wire" to make us accept the "deal" which could have been reached IF the EU was a flexible beneficial institution and NOT one that is INCAPABLE of change (Chirac said as much before he passed away and he was NO fan of the UK!!) and wishes to force/discourage other countries from even thinking of leaving. It has fudged immigration SERIALLY that has resulted in thousands of deaths (UK gov NOT an innocent party in this either!!) and is a "Par Exemplar" of Malthusian growth at ANY cost. I voted to leave as a protest at it's inflexibility and WANTON waste of preciuos resources tha Kel & I know only TOO well!!
I thought that might elicit comment ;0) K
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