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Mr. Mitchell: I am sorry to have provoked the hon. Gentleman to come back on that.
Mr. Salmond: The hon. Gentleman is showing his age. It is more than a decade since the SNP re-oriented its approach to the broader European question. He cannot expect our sympathy and support for the European position to mean that we abide unquestioningly by every European policy. Every pro-European, of whom there are several on these Benches, reserves the right to criticise a policy if it is manifestly wrong, as the common fisheries policy most certainly is.
Mr. Mitchell: I agree. I should not have teased the hon. Gentleman. I have a long memory. I particularly remember the Liberal position when I was standing in a by-election in Grimsby. While the Liberal candidate was telling us that we had to work with Europe, in the middle of the by-election campaign the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) introduced a Bill to take control of Britain's 50-mile limit. People are curiously ambivalent on European issues such as the common fisheries policy--and so they should be. We have to stand up for our rights.
I was extolling the virtues of coastal state management, which we must aim at and move forward to. The central principle is destructive of the CFP--only the nation state has an interest in conserving its fish stocks and building up and protecting its fishing industry. For everybody else, our fish are a disposable resource to be looted and pillaged at will before sailing on somewhere else. For us, they represent the future of our fishing communities, our fishing families and our fishing industry. The nation state has the central interest. The only effective way to control
the situation is a system of management that allows us nationally to impose mesh size and one-net rules and to close grounds.
Mr. Tyler:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for letting me intervene briefly. It saves me making a speech in a minute. The nation state is not the only vehicle for such management. As my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Mr. George), whom I congratulate on introducing the debate, made clear in his speech--for which, I am afraid, the hon. Gentleman was not present--it is possible on a regional basis, within the nation state, to ensure that fishermen have a direct stake in the conservation of the fish stocks on which they depend. That is a major issue of principle. The National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations and the Liberal Democrats have argued for many years for more local control, so that people have a sense of possession over the policies that will affect their livelihood. I do not want the hon. Gentleman to think that the nation state is the only vehicle by which that can be achieved.
Mr. Mitchell:
I was not saying that. I am grateful for that intervention, which allows me to make myself clear. I agree that there should be regional management within national coastal state management. I was positing the argument for coastal state management against the common fisheries policy, which is a policy of no effective management, because there are no uniform rules--there is no control at the port of landing, as there is in this country--and it is difficult to enforce the rules. Regional management is important within coastal state management.
Mr. Gill:
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that a wonderful precedent has already been established in the Falkland Islands? The Government declared a 200-mile exclusive fishing zone. They determine who shall fish in their waters. Those who do so pay for the privilege. They are told what they can catch and know that they have to cease fishing when they have caught up to the limit of their permit. That is a good precedent for the way in which we might manage our fisheries.
Mr. Mitchell:
It could be done like that. The Fishery Limits Act 1976 disallows that power. We exempt European vessels. If we had that control, it would be possible to manage access and the fishing that could go on in our waters.
I was not going to give a long speech. I am sorry that I have spoken for so long. I want to make a couple more points. Coastal state management is the way forward. The Government should argue for it in the renegotiation. The industry also needs investment, because it is in a financial crisis. People argue that British skippers should not sell quota to quota hoppers, but they are forced to do so by dire financial necessity. Why are they in that financial situation? Because they have not had the same access to European funding that competitors have had. Fulfilling their targets by reflagging vessels as British, the Spanish have achieved the MAGP targets and have access to European funding.
The cuts required under MAGP III are, I understand, less than the 20 per cent. that we thought at the end of 1995. Apparently, those cuts are now marginal. I hope
that we can get access to European funding, which the industry needs. It needs financial confidence. If we cannot get access to that funding, there has to be a national alternative. The money must come into the industry.
We are faced with a similar situation under MAGP IV, which will require more substantial cuts. I hope that those cuts will not be combined with a days at sea limitation of the kind that we all fought strenuously when it was proposed by the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon when he was a Fisheries Minister. His attempt to impose that monstrosity brought the industry out in revolt to destroy the proposal. However, there must be some element not of set-aside, but of net-aside financing--not proposed by the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon in his legislation--for the limitation of effort, and financing for decommissioning. National money is needed for that.
Ms Candy Atherton (Falmouth and Camborne):
I, too, thank the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. George) for his constructive speech, which helps all of us in our fight for Cornwall. I should like to draw the Parliamentary Secretary's attention to a problem that particularly affects my fishermen in Falmouth and Penryn. They are concerned about the size of dredging equipment because the over-large size currently used damages the environment; I think that the Government will agree with that.
Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon):
I should like to draw to the Parliamentary Secretary's attention a matter that has just been drawn to mine. Apparently, the Government have just decided to accede to the United Nations convention on the law of the sea and relinquish the Rockall fisheries zone. I should be grateful for the Parliamentary Secretary's clarification, because I received a fax this morning from the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations, which has not been consulted--I do not suppose anybody else has. Given the Government's widely proclaimed intention of running an open system, this seems slightly curious. It would be helpful to all of us if the Parliamentary Secretary could clarify the position, either in this debate or shortly afterwards.
The hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. George) succeeds in his constituency somebody who took a powerful and informed interest in fisheries, and I am glad that he intends to do the same. His proposals for regionalisation
have attractions, but there are many unanswered questions as well. I thought that he was hinting at some sort of multinational regional concept when he talked about North sea communities. As he knows, our fisheries are mixed fisheries with historical rights of access. Is he envisaging that the communities around the North sea will form one of those regional communities? That might be most obvious around the Irish sea. Is he envisaging that control will be exercised by groups belonging to different member states? There is also the channel, with historical rights on both the English and the French sides. The hon. Gentleman needs to define what he means by regionalisation.
The enforcement problems will be difficult if there is a series of immensely heterogeneous fisheries with immensely heterogeneous rules which are imposed by local communities. How does that deal with historical rights? How does it deal with people who are not based in that part of the world but who fish there and have long-established fisheries? An example of that is the Scottish pelagic fleet, which comes to the south-west. How would the rules be communicated and enforced? I see that as a recipe for great difficulty. I know that, every summer, there is the usual stand-off and fight between the Spanish and French boats in the tuna fishery in the Bay of Biscay. There is much that needs to be dealt with.
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