Fury over European Parliament threat: ‘No free trade on seafood without access to British waters’
I increasingly think fishing will become one of the surprising but early battle lines in the nasty side of Brexit. This will impact on a number of vulnerable communities from Newlyn in Cornwall to Berwick in Northumberalnd. This article tells us:
A powerful group of MEPs has prompted fury after insisting that the Brexit deal must force the UK to surrender access to its fishing waters in return for a free trade deal on seafood.
The European Parliament’s fisheries committee said it would be “unacceptable” to give the UK’s seafood producers free access to EU markets if trawlers from the Continent “no longer had access” to British fishing grounds.
It recommended that the parliament agree that the two issues should be treated as a “single block” in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations, stating that one is “inseparable” from the other.
But Ian Duncan, a Scottish Conservative MEP, said this was “peculiar, unprecedented and counter-productive” as no other trade deal brokered by the EU has included access to fishing grounds as a requirement.