EU Referendum


Booker: UK- the bully-boy in Guernsey


16/08/2015



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Compared with other international crises making headlines round the world it may not seem to rank high, writes Booker, but it is time we began to ask what the British government thinks it is doing to the little Channel island of Guernsey.

The inhabitants of that island and those around it, such as Alderney and Sark, making up the "Bailiwick of Guernsey", are rightly up in arms at the extraordinarily high-handed way in which the UK government, in flagrant breach of their constitutional relationship, has aimed a devastating blow at one of their oldest and most prized industries – their fishing fleet.

To understand just how badly the British government is behaving, we first need to recall certain basic facts. As Crown Dependencies, the Channel Islands are not ruled by the United Kingdom, with which they only became linked when William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. And they are not part of the European Union.

This means that their rich fishing waters are not governed by the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and, as was confirmed by a formal agreement as recently as 2012, Guernsey's 147 fishing boats are therefore not subject to the EU's "quota" system, dictating what fish they can and can't catch.

That is precisely why, unlike the UK, Guernsey has been able to operate its own thoroughly responsible, "sustainable" fishing policy. This not only allows its fishermen to earn a good living while preserving their stocks, but allows them to export 80 percent of their catch to France.

They also have longstanding reciprocal arrangements by which British and French boats can fish in their waters, and Bailiwick boats can fish outside them, under UK licences.

But this year, as a "precautionary measure" following last year's Channel storms, Brussels decided to impose a massive cut in the allowable quotas for high-value species generically known as "skate and ray".

So drastic has been the cut imposed on the UK that Whitehall, quite illegally, decided to extend this crippling restriction to Guernsey, even though the skate and ray its fishermen catch are all in its own waters, where the CFP does not apply.

When Guernsey protested that this was in breach of the 2012 agreement, the UK’s fisheries minister, George Eustice, responded by banning Guernsey's boats from fishing in UK and EU waters.

This in itself was a severe blow to many Guernsey fishermen, such as the skipper whose family have for generations set lobster pots just outside Guernsey waters, and who now risks losing his livelihood. Eustice, quite arbitrarily, has suspended the fishermen's UK licences which, because they are saleable, are a significant financial asset.

All this was explicitly done to increase what remains of the skate and ray quota allowed to fishermen in the UK, easily the largest chunk of which goes to the fishermen of Cornwall where, as it happens, Eustice – a former Ukip candidate – is a Tory MP.

But what the minister also failed to understand when he sought to impose his diktat on Guernsey was that the island is a real democracy. The 47 members of its island Parliament are all truly independent.

They cannot be whipped into line. And what he was demanding was something they could in no way accept, not just because it was illegal but because it raises an important constitutional issue in Guernsey's relationship with Britain, going back nearly 1,000 years (we may be celebrating the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215, but Guernsey won a similar guarantee of its own liberties off King John in 1204).

So this British minister not only fails to grasp that he has no legal power to demand that the islanders should obey an EU rule that does not apply to them. He also doesn't understand what it is to live in a proper democracy.

And for that he is ready to destroy the livelihoods of all those who work under a genuinely "sustainable" fishing policy, lauded by environmentalists, which is a model of everything the EU’s notoriously bureaucratic and unworkable Common Fisheries Policy cannot begin to emulate.

By his thoughtless actions, Mr Eustice has provoked an absurdly damaging and thoroughly unnecessary crisis. Someone above him in London needs urgently to tell him that he must stop behaving like a school bully who seeks out the smallest boy in the playground to beat up, in the hope that no one is watching.

Some years back, when a previous British government tried to enforce on the Channel Islands an EU financial directive that didn't apply to them, their politicians eventually caved in. Booker wrote then "what the islands need is a Churchill, but all they have is a row of Chamberlains".

But since then things have changed. Guernsey has cleaned up its finance industry, it is responsibly and intelligently run – and its politicians are no longer in any mood to appease illegal bullies.