EXCLUSIVE: Fleetwood in Lancashire use to have more than 120 trawlers now there are just two left and skippers fear Westminster is trying to force them out of business.
Fishermen in Fleetwood feel sold out by Sir Keir during the EU summit (Image: Dave Nelson/ PA )
Sir Keir Starmer has been slammed for “selling out” British fisherman with a dismal catch of the day giving EU trawlers access to UK waters for another 12 years. At what has been dubbed a ‘surrender summit’ in London on Monday the PM agreed to allow European vessels to operate around the British coast until 2038.
There was no improvement on the 2020 Brexit deal which saw UK fishermen handed just 25% of EU quotas around these islands, and London will still dish out annual quotas for catches with Brussels and Norway. Sir Keir has said the deal is “protecting our access, rights and fishing areas with no increase in the amount that EU vessels can catch in British waters”.
Mr Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen enjoyed a cosy summit (Image: PA )
But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the agreement meant “nobody has lost more than the fishermen”, and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage added it would be “the end of the fishing industry”.
The real-world devastation caused by Westminster wrangling with Eurocrats can perhaps be seen nowhere as starkly as in Fleetwood, Lancs, where just two trawlers remain from a once mighty armada of around 120 vessels in the 1960s.
A third of the population, 11,000 people, were once employed directly, or indirectly, by the industry. The town was hit hard by the so-called Cod Wars in the 1970s, which saw the UK government back down to Iceland over fishing rights.
The two trawlers in Fleetwood are the Mi Amore and L’Aventurier, skippered and owned respectively by John Worthington, 59, and William ‘Billy’ McGough, 83.
Great granddad John Worthington also has a shrimp boat called East Bar. “It’s absolutely disgusting, we are supposed to be out the EU with Brexit, Starmer has been done up like a kipper, it’s true”, said Mr Worthington, who’s been fishing since he left school.
“Since Brexit we’ve had trackers fitted, we’ve got a market dictated by the EU. We’ve been sold down river.
“We were supposed to be out of the old agreement next year but he’s just gone and given it away. It feels like they are trying to get us out of a job.
“The European boats can take any size of fish they want but we are limited to certain sizes. They scoop the lot up and they don’t get bothered by our authorities. We should be more like France where they stick up for the rights of fishermen, the French wouldn’t put up with this what we are putting up with.”
Great-granddad Billy McGough, 83, said he once employed a crew but now heads out on the boat on his own. He said the quay was bequeathed to the fishermen by Queen Victoria.
He said: “I’ve been doing this for 60 years, I have trained three lads to go but we can’t make any money.
“In the 80s there were 70 boats in here, but the prices now are still the same as they were then. With fuel it’s never less than £80 a day to go out, when you’ve got a catch it’ll be a couple of hundred if that, then you’ve got your commission.
“But we are down here every day keeping the boats ready to go.”
John Worthington, Bill McGough and Dave Pilling (Image: Dave Nelson )
Harry Maplethorpe, 20, works as a filleter at the town’s historic docks and Jubilee Quay which date back to the Victorian era. He said he was hoping to work in the fishing industry as a career for life but now he worries that dream could be shattered.
Harry, who voted for Reform at the General Election, said: “Keir Starmer has sold out the fishing industry.
“There’s not a chance I trust him in these negotiations with Europe, his decisions seem terrible for Britain and good for the EU.
“Brexit never happened properly either. Everyone that I work with votes Reform, a couple of lads are the same age as me and the others are in their 40s and 50s.
Fisherman and dad-of-four Dave Pilling, 45, comes from a long line of so-called “Cod heads”, the local nickname for people from Fleetwood. His grandfather and uncles all worked in the industry.
He works on a boat fishing anywhere from four to 15 miles off the coast, mainly catching flatfish like plaice, dabs, turbot and rays. Mr Pilling voted for Brexit to get out of the EU and “to get out fishing quotas back”.
He said: “I don’t trust Keir Starmer to protect British fishing and British waters. Basically, he is agreeing to sub-contract out our fishing industry to the EU.
“We’ve already got competition from the EU boats; they’re allowed to catch more fish in our waters than we are allowed to catch.
“Why can a Spanish boat come into British waters and catch more fish than a British boat is allowed to catch? It’s ridiculous.
“Fishing boats round here are getting decommissioned all the time because of this. The prices we are getting for the fish have not really changed in the last 20 years. The prices the supermarkets sell it for has tripled, the price that we get hasn’t tripled.
“There are two trawlers left in Fleetwood, five boats altogether but three of them are whelk fishing boats. They’re British owned with a Latvian crew.
“The way things are going now we might have no trawlers left.”
Mr Pilling has a much more positive view of Reform UK and the fishing sector, and he met Nigel Farage in the Strawberry Gardens pub in Fleetwood a few weeks ago. The grand old building used to be the drinking hole for skippers only, with crew – known as deckers – drinking elsewhere in the town.
He said: “Nigel Farage has fishing boats himself, he knows about fishing. He was talking to me about it when he visited here. I trust him more than I do Labour and the Conservatives.”
Mr Pilling also warned the so-called Net Zero drive for renewable energy was having what many fishermen believe is an adverse effect on the fish.
He added: “A lot of the fish won’t swim near the wind farms out there. We’ve built them on the turbot ground, the hard ground they like, which is around 30 to 60 foot deep. Which is also the ideal place to build a wind farm.
“Where the wind farms are now is where our fishing grounds were, they thought the wind farms would be like wrecks and attract fish. But they actually scare them away.”
