European Union (Amendment) Bill

There is a word called yes and there is a word called no. Which would the hon. Lady use in this context? Will she tell us? Very well: she cannot tell us whether the Liberal Democratic party supports the common fisheries policy or not. In any event, very few people want it, and only those Liberal Democrats who say yes—which presumably includes the hon. Lady—support it. All my hon. Friends regard the common fisheries policy as a disaster. They are all embarrassed by it, and they all want to change it. However, they tend to view it as part of the package. If you like Europe, you must like the common fisheries policy. Well, my amendment allows them to dissociate themselves from it and to say ““We like Europe and we will accept the treaty, but we are going to exclude the common fisheries policy.”” That is the sensible thing to do. It gives us a real power to choose. It is not necessarily part of the package: it can be taken out, and it would be taken out by my amendment. However, I tabled the amendment not just to knock out the faults in the treaty that I have enumerated, but to prevent the coping stone of the words in the treaty from being incorporated in the arch of the common fisheries policy. I intended to prevent a rather messy, anomalous policy, which no one likes but everyone feels obliged to support for different reasons, from being a requirement of the treaty. If we ratify the treaty unamended, the common fisheries policy will remain as an essential policy, sanctified and upheld by the treaty, from which we cannot deviate. That policy should not be part of the structure. Indeed, it was only fiddled into the structure by means of a very devious approach. There was no fisheries policy in the treaty of Rome, the founding document of the European Union—it simply was not mentioned. That treaty provides for a common market in respect of trade in agricultural products including, it is stated, the products of fisheries, or fish. There is nothing about a policy of controlling catches, regulating quotas and providing aid for vessels, or about what species can or cannot be caught. All that is mentioned is internal trade in fish. That is how the arrangement rested from 1956 until 1970, which is a long time not to have a policy. Then Britain entered negotiations to join the Common Market, as did Norway. Those nations had among the richest fishing grounds in the world, and certainly the two richest fishing grounds in the Common Market if they were to enter it. It was therefore thought necessary to cobble together a policy to get access to the fishing grounds of Britain and Norway. Negotiations started in June 1970, and they quickly resulted not in a policy, but in a statement that there should be equal access to a common resource. That was all that there was to the basis of the so-called common fisheries policy—just equal access. European vessels would have equal access to our fishing grounds and those of Norway, and to all our waters. That was in fact a negotiating gambit, not a sine qua non, but Edward Heath took it to be compulsory. He thought that that proposal had to be accepted if he was going to get entry to the Common Market, and he was desperate to get entry because he had no other strategy. Therefore, he regarded fisheries in the way set out in the documents in Scotland. I ask the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) to remind me of the phrase.