Britain must pull out of discredited fisheries policy

IT SEEMS the core problem of the fishing crisis is the Common Fisheries Policy itself and its quotas, designed by bureaucrats in ivory towers. There, deals about quotas take place behind closed doors. Scotland’s weakness is that we don’t have anybody in Brussels who is prepared to defend her interests. Being in the larger unit of the UK confers no advantages. When the minister began to attack the fishermen we knew he was going to give way under pressure.

Your article of December 22 talked of reforms in the CFP, but these are hardly likely to help Scottish fishermen and do not seem to address the real problem. The only reform that would protect the Scottish fishing fleet and also save the fish stocks would be - in my view - the abandonment of CFP and the repatriation of the appropriate sea areas back to the littoral powers. The present system cannot be made to work properly.

Pro tem adequate funds should be available to cover tying up because the crisis is to be laid at the door of the government, and the government should pay. These funds are to be for tying up and not for decommissioning, which might be the government’s preferred option, for this would inevitably signal the death knell of Scottish fishing.

David G Guild, Edinburgh

POLITICS has failed Fraserburgh and Peterhead. The European fishing deal is a travesty of everything that is right and proper.

I do not accept that Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler is part of a conspiracy to destroy the Scottish fleet so that the Spanish and others will get access to our seas, but I do believe that he sees Scottish fishermen as part of the problem and not the solution.

Politics failed Fraserburgh and Peterhead, but only politics can rescue it. We will soon know if the Scottish parliament is interested in the areas outside the Central Belt. It is duty-bound to provide substantial financial compensation for the people employed on shore as well as the skippers and their crews.

We also need a guarantee that the fishing deal is a one-time affair and that next year the Scottish whitefish fleet will be able to do away with hand-outs and be allowed to earn its keep from the sea. No Scottish politician can guarantee that under the present system.

We must leave the Common Fisheries Policy. It has led us to ruin; it is morally corrupt and its credibility is shot to pieces. Any new system must not allow nations that are not involved in the North Sea a vote over what happens there. Never again should a politician from land-locked Austria be in a position to make life-or-death decisions about Scotland’s coastal communities.

Stewart Whyte, Scottish Conservative PSPC, Banff and Buchan