EU rules sends our fish to landfill.

Sunny Cornwall.  It seems like heaven on earth.  But for the fishing community at Padstow it is anything but. 

Chatting to a boats man at the harbour yesterday about the referendum his response was emphatic.  Virtually every fisherman in the community will be voting to leave the EU.  You can understand why.

The fishing fleet in Padstow has decreased dramatically over the last twenty years, a pattern you can see repeated around the fishing harbours of of the UK. 

Local inshore crabbers Susie Jean PW 372, Dunlin FY 516, Tekapo E 61 and Julia Ann PW 97 unloading at Padstow in June 1985

Grimsby was once the fishing capital of the world.  Locals attribute its demise to the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).  The CFP, which was adopted in 1983, restricted member nations exclusive fishing rights to a belt of water 12-nautical miles from their own coastlines, leaving the rest of the waters open to all other member-states where quotas were enforced setting limits on the amount of fish every nation could take.

Down in Essex at Ray in Leigh the feeling is the same as his Padstow cousins.  "The impact of Draconian EU rules and quotas have been devastating.  It used to be packed with fishing boats, now they've all gone.", lamented one fisherman last week.

And here is one of the most bizarre facts about the EU and how it imposes solutions that are of no moral sense.   

Remember the old way the EU imposed quotas?  Catch over your quota and you have to throw fish back into the sea.  It meant many dead fish were discarded needlessly.  If that wasn’t bad enough the EU, to address this, introduced a so-called discard ban.  I’m not making this up.  This ban means fisherman must land all their catch even if they go over quotas.  However, some are still alive and would have lived if thrown back.  But now they must be killed and sent to landfill.

When we have people going to foodbanks the EU forces us to dump high quality fish just so we meet the EU imposed quotas. 

No wonder the fishermen of Padstow want out.