Tag Archives: UK’s departure from the EU
End of the line? How Brexit left Hull’s fishing industry facing extinction
It was a Wednesday morning and it had been touch and go whether all of them would be able to get time off from their day jobs to make the trip. Seven hours later, they stood on the quayside at Greenwich, as Princess Anne swung a bottle of champagne at the looming yellow hull of the UK’s newest and biggest whitefish trawler. Many of the people gathered that day had voted for Brexit in the EU referendum and hopes were high that it would usher in a new era for a British industry that had been dwindling for years. The Kirkella was the larger of two new boats built by the private company UK Fisheries in 2018, at a combined cost of nearly £59m, landing fish at Hull for the first time in a decade. The Princess Royal summed up the optimistic mood on the quayside when she offered her congratulations “to the owner for their investment in the future of fishing”. As the bottle smashed against the boat, the players launched into a lung-busting rendition of Hearts of Oak. >click to read< 09:02
“This is an absolute shambles –fishermen always seem to get used as a bargaining chip”
Following the UK’s departure from the EU at 11pm on Hogmanay, new rules governing trade have crippled the sector, which is hugely important to many fragile communities across the Highlands and Islands. As a result, many creel boats have stopped fishing altogether, while the transport firms responsible for delivering crab, lobster and langoustine to European buyers staged a drive-slow protest in London on Monday of this week. Fisherman Duncan McAndrew, from Duncraig in Lochalsh, told the Free Press that those reliant on the live export of shellfish had been “absolutely shafted” by UK ministers, who “knew this was going to happen for months. >click to read< 07:45
