Luke Pollard: Fishers Have Every Right To Be Angry Over The Brexit Deal
The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations has dubbed the government s trade deal ar “miniscule, marginal, paltry, pathetic” | Adobe Stock
12 January
Labour s shadow environment secretary says that British fishers have been betrayed by Brexit – and he has a vision for how to turn their trade around. He talks to Georgina Bailey.
Luke Pollard is a fishing nerd. He knows it, his staff know it, and after 55 minutes talking with him over Zoom, I do too.
However, he believes that he is in a small minority in Parliament – you could count those among his colleagues who deeply understand fishing on one hand, he tells me. This is part of the reason why fishers have been “screwed”; not just by the Brexit trade deal, but by successive years of government policy that left fishing communities behind, he says.
Marine Scotland has been accused of allowing “an environmental disaster” by mismanaging fishing and refusing to exclude trawlers from inshore areas where fishermen catch prawns.
DURING the long and turbulent four-and-a-half years it took from the vote on leaving the EU for the “full Brexit” to happen, many pledges were made by the Tories over what it would achieve. Here we examine whether some of these key promises have been delivered.
The promise: £350 million a week for public services One of the most prominent symbols of the Vote Leave campaign was a red bus emblazoned with claim that the UK sends the EU £350 million a week, with the slogan “Let’s fund our NHS instead”. The year after the referendum Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, revived the claim in a newspaper article stating: “Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350m per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.”