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Mr. Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby): Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr. Forsyth: I have been generous in giving way, and Madam Speaker is keen that we make progress. I know that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) does not share the view of Opposition Front-Bench Members on these matters.
It would be far more realistic and effective to work for improvements within the CFP, and that is our strategy. Those who argue that we should seek to co-operate behind the barriers of 200-mile fisheries limits must have forgotten the lessons learnt painfully during the early years of the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission. The common fisheries policy offers us a substantial improvement on the voluntary and ineffective system epitomised by the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission. Those who think that Norway offers us a model for managing our fisheries should study that model more closely before they assume that it could be easily or costlessly replicated here.
The fishing industry does not need bogus options. What is needed is the courage to face up to the real issues, and to recognise the practical realities and the real opportunities to improve the working of the common fisheries policy. That is why Fisheries Ministers have initiated a review of the CFP. This is a review not by the Commission, but by an independent British group. It has been drawn from the fishing industry, the processors, the scientists and the environmental interests. I understand that members of that independent group expect to report early next year. I look forward to seeing their findings, because there will be opportunities to carry forward changes to the CFP without waiting till the next major review, in 2002.
That is also why the Government have committed substantial sums--£53 million over five years--to decommissioning older fishing vessels, and reducing fishing capacity towards the targets which we have accepted in the multi-annual guidance programme. It is also why the Government have led the fight to resist the cumbersome and bureaucratic proposals that the Commission advances for fisheries management, most recently for regulating fishing efforts in western waters. My hon. Friend the Minister of State will be able to talk about some of those initiatives and opportunities later in the debate.
Underpinning all that work is a fundamental need to ensure that the fishermen and their representatives are drawn more closely into the process of managing their fisheries. That is something to which Fisheries Ministers in the United Kingdom are firmly committed.
I despair of the Opposition amendments. This month the Liberals are suggesting that we advance the next review of the CFP. Only last month, the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Wallace) saw no need for that in an Adjournment debate.
Mr. James Wallace (Orkney and Shetland)
indicated dissent.
Mr. Michael Forsyth:
The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he said:
As for Labour, whose members pose as the fishermen's friend, what has it understood about fisheries policy? Nothing that I can see in the amendment. What has it to contribute to the reform of the CFP? Does not it recall its acquiescence in the 1986 Iberian Treaty of Accession? The hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) said:
What of conservation? I do not recall much about that in the Labour party's last manifesto--[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Glanford and Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) knows that there was nothing in it. Nor was there anything in the manifesto for the European Parliament, or in Labour's actions when in office during the 1970s. Indeed, the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) was a Minister at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food at the time. I do not recall that he or his colleagues did much to assist the fishing industry then.
Of course we recognise the need for effective conservation. We have committed £53 million to decommissioning. We have pursued the difficult agenda of limiting fishing effort.
There is a difference between the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends and the Opposition Front-Bench amendment. My hon. Friends are motivated by conviction and a passionate concern to ensure that the Government fight for British interests. I am prepared to accept that some Labour Members are similarly motivated; but the amendment in the name of the Leader of the Opposition is in another league altogether. It seeks to criticise the Government for not getting a good enough deal for our fishermen, yet every time the Government put the UK's interests first and fight for them, Labour leaders are to be found lining up with their socialist friends on the continent to denounce Britain for standing alone. When the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and his colleagues
were in office, so afraid were they of standing up to our partners that they allowed Brussels to filch massive sums from the pockets of UK taxpayers. Only when Baroness Thatcher took office was a substantial rebate secured.
To be fair, a handful of Opposition Members could, in all sincerity, have put their names to the amendment--but they are not among those whose names appear on the Order Paper. The amendment has not been framed to keep the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) on side--far from it. It is simply a squalid exercise in synthetic patriotism by those whose sole objective is to try to entice some of my hon. Friends to withhold their support from the Government, so that the Opposition can hasten the day when they obtain power to deliver these islands, lock, stock and barrel, to the forces of federalism.
It is nauseating to see the party which for decades has clothed itself in the red flag now seeking to wrap itself in the Union flag; whereas in reality Labour would sail under a white flag and be forced to abandon our fishermen to the party's vision of an ever more integrated Europe.
I am the first to acknowledge the degree of concern among my hon. Friends. I must tell them and the communities they represent that we understand their anxieties, and that we have fought, and will always fight, for their right to fish the waters around our shores--consistent with maintaining adequate fish stocks. My hon. Friends' determination will command respect among the fishing communities of Britain, but I appeal to them not to risk compromising that respect by associating themselves with a bunch of sell-out merchants whose earlier crimes have already resulted in a sentence of 16 years on the Opposition Benches. Nothing in their behaviour suggests that they deserve any remission; indeed an extension of the sentence would seem to be the only answer.
Dr. Gavin Strang (Edinburgh, East):
I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
The House will be aware that this is the major annual fisheries debate of the parliamentary year. It precedes the important December meeting of the Council of Fisheries Ministers, which is to agree total allowable catches, quotas and other changes to the workings of the common fisheries policy.
I welcome the Secretary of State for Scotland to our debate. I hope that there is nothing to be read into the fact that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food left halfway through the Secretary of State's remarks. We shall assume that he had another engagement.
The Secretary of State referred to the 1992 Labour party manifesto. My hon. Friend the Member for Glanford and Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley), who will wind up for the Opposition, may refer to the fisheries document we issued, but I do not think that we should spend much time arguing about the 1992 manifestos. [Interruption.] There is a difference between a Government who win on their manifesto, and a party that loses on its manifesto. [Interruption.] Perhaps Conservative Members do not know the constitutional position. Oppositions are not bound by their manifestos; Governments are.
"The common fisheries policy should comprise a host of other detailed matters. I welcome the review group and look forward with interest to the outcome. The year 2002 will come upon us sooner than we think, and we must begin to put in place the measures that we want to see by then."--[Official Report, 22 November 1995; Vol. 267, c. 585.]
"We welcome the accession of Spain and Portugal. It is the right move for the Community and for Spain and Portugal. We welcome it because we recognise the merits of those two new democracies joining the rest of Europe and facing Europe's problems with us."
He continued:
"The Opposition do not welcome accession blindly, ignorantly or oblivious of the difficulties and anxieties."--[Official Report, 10 December 1985; Vol. 88, c. 883.]
The Opposition seem all too keen to gainsay what the hon. Gentleman said then. That treaty provided for the special protection of the Irish box to end at the end of this year. If the Government had done nothing, the Spanish boats would have been free to enter the whole of the Irish box outside territorial waters. Do not the Opposition understand that the deal that we negotiated last year maintains some protection for these sensitive waters; that it maintains the exclusion of the Spanish from the North sea; that it caps Spanish fishing effort in the west at the levels provided for in their Act of Accession? There is no Spanish armada, and that is a measure of our success: not walking away from the CFP but improving it from within.
"believes that the agreements of the Council of Fisheries Ministers, allowing Spanish fishing vessels into the Irish Box and allowing increased access for Spanish fishing vessels to the waters of the west of the United Kingdom, present an unacceptable threat to the long-term economic viability of fishing communities in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and place unsustainable pressure upon the fish stocks in these already sensitive waters; recognises the failure of the United Kingdom Government to implement a decommissioning policy until 1993, and notes that Ministers only abandoned their unfair, unpopular and unworkable days-at-sea proposal after the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations challenged the Government in the European Court of Justice; concludes that the United Kingdom Government has not effectively represented in Europe the interests of the United Kingdom fishing industry, and has failed to implement in the United Kingdom a fisheries policy that is in the interests of the United Kingdom fishing industry; recognises that the over-riding priority of the Common Fisheries Policy must be the conservation of fish stocks, for only through healthy stocks can the fishing industry survive; believes that the Common Fisheries Policy in its present
19 Dec 1995 : Column 1357form does not adequately meet this priority; and calls on the United Kingdom Government to work in Europe to secure reforms of the Common Fisheries Policy to ensure the conservation and fair allocation of fish stocks throughout the European Union, with effective enforcement by all member states."
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