European Union (Amendment) Bill

Before the noble Duke does that, the Minister has not answered the question of how the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway, to name but a few, manage their own fish stocks for the benefit of their own people. The Minister has not answered the question I put to him, which is very important: why can that policy not be changed? What is the position between the Commission and the Council of Ministers? How is it possible that a group of 27 nations cannot get together and agree unanimously to change that policy? I also cannot let the Minister off with his statement that we would still need to collaborate with our European neighbours on some form of common fisheries policy. We would not. We would simply tell them to leave our waters while our fish stocks recovered and work for the benefit, in the first instance, of our fishing industry, which would recover. We would address discards in that way; like other countries, we would simply ban them. With our growing fishing industry, we would land all the fish that we catch. We would eat those that we want for human consumption; we could use some for animal consumption; and we could use the rest for fertiliser. We would not have to throw 30,000 articulated lorries-worth of fish dead back into the sea every year if we were managing our own fish.