How the UK turned fishing rights into a commodity
Greenpeace: Fleetwood was once a major fishing hub in the UK its docks were a major employer. But no trawlers sail out of the town’s port anymore. How did this happen? As Crispin Dowler discovered, while the decline of the British fishing sector drove coastal support for leaving the EU, many of the industry’s problems originated closer to home. Around 20 years ago, fishermen in Fleetwood, Lancashire, managed to make national news by inviting several dozen Spanish trawlers to join their cooperative. This “unprecedented marriage of convenience” provoked fury from other British fishermen, according to reports at the time. The spokesman for one of Fleetwood’s south-western counterparts told the BBC they were “very angry that Fleetwood could abandon principles it has had for so many years”. The Spanish vessel owners in question were (and still are) known as “quota hoppers” – fishermen from other countries who had bought British boats and licences to gain access to the UK’s fishing quota.
Quota hoppers have long been a source of deep resentment for British fishermen. They are held up as evidence for the widely-held view that European Union membership has been a raw deal for the UK’s fishing industry, and the origin of its decline. Their presence on the UK fishing register has been controversial from the eighties to the present day, and was one driver of the huge support for Brexit in coastal towns. In England and Wales particularly, overseas owners have bought up vast swathes of fishing rights. An Unearthed investigation last autumn found that around half of England’s quota is held on Dutch, Spanish, or Icelandic-owned “flagships”, so called because they sail under a British flag. One Dutch multinational alone controls around a quarter of English quota. By comparison, the UK’s small scale, “inshore” vessels must fish from a pool of quota amounting to less than 2%, despite making up around 79% of the UK fishing fleet.
But in truth, the decline of the British fishing industry began some years before the EU’s common fisheries policy (CFP) took effect. And the quota hoppers are better understood as a symptom of a larger problem: decades of mismanagement by UK governments, which have seen fishing rights first commodified and then consolidated in the hands of a small and wealthy elite. It’s a story that is tied up with that of Fleetwood, and of the Fleetwood Fish Producer Association’s deal with the “Spanish Armada”.
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