I missed this when it was published in April but Polly Toynbee concisely gets to the very heart of the issue of fisheries – ownership and quota allocation – and Brexit exposing another of the Brexiteers lies.

Propaganda delivered the Brexit vote but it can’t land more fish – Polly Toynbee

British skippers weren’t denied fair quotas by the EU, Britain let them sell their fishing rights to foreign boats

Monday 23 Apr 2018 06.00

Standing on the shingle of Hastings beach beside his fishing boat, Paul Joy says his family have fished these waters since before the time of William the Conqueror. He’s done the research, and the Joys have had boats here since records began. His boat had been out at dawn that morning, hugging the coastline with a skipper, two crew and the “boy” ashore, aged 80, who winches the Kaya up the pebbles with a rusty bulldozer. “My father, Will, born in 1906, made an adequate living with a smaller boat than mine. Now everyone subsidises fishing with other work. I earned the same as a carpenter, now you’re lucky to get a Tesco shelf-stacker’s pay.” Fishing quotas are killing the small fishermen, he says.

Stand here to breathe in the heart of Brexit. Last week, in ports around the country, fishing boats protested – sending up flares to oppose the transition deal that leaves them in the common fisheries policy (CFP), but without a seat at the EU table sharing out the fish. Protest organisers said: “We are sickened by remainers gleefully peddling the deliberate narrative that fishing doesn’t matter.”

Does it matter? The fishing industry is worth less than 0.5% of GDP. They rightly fear this pinprick to the economy will be traded for bigger prizes – finance, cars, pharma, airline routes. Why else, they ask, is the government’s fisheries white paper delayed time and again? Thirteen Rees-Moggites and one DUP MP swear they’ll vote down any deal unless the UK breaks from the CFP. As these hard Brexiteers want no deal anyway, fishing is their perfect pretext, though no deal would be the fishermen’s apocalypse.

Here the referendum was lost, in the romance of the sea, the rugged cliffs and coasts of our island story among old salt spirits of a seafaring nation. This is the symbolism the remainers fatally forgot, tone deaf to the draw of John Masefield’s poem Sea Fever or Millais’s The Boyhood of Raleigh. Economics says fishing is of nugatory value, but politics says fishing is deep-dyed in national identity, down to the last fish and chip shop. That heart-versus-head error is why remain lost – and why its campaigners still fail to connect with unreasoning national sentiments. They forget those sentiments can be cashable too: Hastings’ 27 picturesque boats, huts and fish stalls bring the impoverished town £5m a year in tourism.

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