European Union (Amendment) Bill

I, too, support the amendment. Perhaps I may add an interesting statistic to the figures given by the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, who estimated that for every tonne landed some 5 tonnes are discarded. Another way of putting that is that some 30,000 articulated lorriesful of dead fish are thrown back into the sea every year. That is about the measure of the problem; indeed, it is the lowest estimate that we have from the European Union. Other estimates put the figure at 50,000 articulated lorries, quite enough fish to fill the Palace of Westminster and the whole of Whitehall several times over—and there must be a number of fishermen who have lost their livelihoods who might feel that that would be a more positive use of those premises. The argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that fish do not have passports and do not respect national boundaries does not work for the United Kingdom. I think that, the night before Edward Heath signed away our fisheries in a side agreement to the treaty of accession in 1972, we owned 70 per cent of the fish that swim all year round in European waters. Of course, that is why our dear partners-to-be in the European Union were so keen to get hold of them. Again, Canada is not a good example. One has only to look at the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway to see how a fishery can be successfully managed by a democratic nation state on its own. The average take-home pay of a Faroe Islands fisherman has become £45,000 a year under the islands’ policy. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson and, I have no doubt, the Minister will say that the common fisheries policy requires radical change. I believe that the words ““and fisheries”” were added at the end of the heading on the common agricultural policy chapter in the Maastricht treaty. If you read on through the treaty as it was before those words were added, you will see that everything refers to agriculture—merely ““and fisheries”” was added at Maastricht. Now, in the treaty of Lisbon, there is an attempt to adjust that by saying that any phrase that comes in that part of the treaty and sounds as though it is to do with agriculture also covers fisheries. My question to the Minister is: why is it impossible to change this policy? Does it require unanimity? Can we not get a famous qualified majority vote? Who is it who opposes change to this scandalous policy? It must be one of the most destructive environmental policies on the planet, yet we are told that we need to be in the European Union to benefit from its environmental wisdom, weight in international negotiations and all the rest of it. Is it true that the bureaucrats who designed this policy in the first place had never been to sea? They had probably never seen a ship, let alone a fish unless it was sitting on their plate. Is it true that they did not realise that when the nets come up from the sea most of the fish in them are already dead? The attempt to practise conservation by limiting the number of fish that are landed in port was the mistake that caused the discards. I trust that that was a refreshingly brief intervention, but the question remains: why cannot this policy be changed? How is it possible that the nations of the European Union cannot come together and make discards illegal, as is done in these other countries, and simply eat or otherwise use all the fish that we have taken out of the sea and which are dead? Why do we have to throw them back?