Brexit reset: Has Keir Starmer sold Devon and Cornwall's fishers down the river?
"I voted to leave on the promises of what Mr Johnson told us", says Mike Young, a fisherman from Brixham.
"He went totally back on the word he gave us, and it looks like it has happened again now."
Mike is saying what a lot of the UK's fishing fleet is thinking today, as Sir Keir Starmer's much-trailed Brexit reset has seen him extend EU fishing rights in British waters for another 12 years, until 2038.
Fishing was the sticky point in negotiations over the weekend, which went on into the small hours of Monday morning, when the UK-EU summit was just a few hours away.
Like any negotiation, sacrifices have to be made, and for the prime minister to get closer to the EU on things like defence and security, it's clear he needed to make some concessions elsewhere.
The EU - led largely by the French - has been pushing for an extension to the post-Brexit fishing deal that would give them guaranteed, long term access to UK waters.
It was due to expire at the end of June 2026, with the Cornish Fish Producers' Organisation recently calling for a "fairer deal".
To get into the finer detail, this was largely about Boris Johnson giving EU vessels access to the UK's 6-12 nautical mile zone - an area off the coast of many communities in the South West that fishers strongly argue should be exclusively for them only.
Many voted for Brexit on the promise of total control over UK waters - and many argue they've never seen it. Now fishers won't be able to re-negotiate for at least another 12 years, under the terms of Labour's reset deal, which the Conservatives and Reform have called a big "Brexit betrayal".
But what some coastal Labour MPs are saying to me, is that there was never going to be a better deal.
They argue that people who voted for Brexit were doing so on 'false promises', and anyone with knowledge of these negotiations knows that this deal is the best it's going to get - for now, anyway.
In terms of what fishing provides for the UK economy, it's relatively small, but it's also not to be sniffed at, and it's important. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the sector contributes around 0.03% of GDP.
So for every £1,000 of total economic output, around 30p.
But it provides a critical source of income, not just through catch but with boat maintenance and tourism.
The industry helps with food security and reports have shown it is critical when it comes to community cohesion. Particularly in parts of Devon and Cornwall, fishing is intertwined with identity and can be traced back generations.
So, from an optics point of view, the angry headlines are not ideal for the prime minister and his new coastal MPs who now have to try and appease a disappointed sector.
They hope that a £360 million investment into coastal communities might help soften the blow, with promises to modernise the fleet, upgrade equipment, and provide skills and training into the future.
They'll also pitch this deal as giving fishers must better access to the EU, making exports much easier.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Farage was the Spending Review's real winner
When Chancellors approach a major moment like a Spending Review, they tend to have a figure in their mind's eye – someone who embodies the type of voter they hope to win over at the next election: a Mondeo man or Stevenage woman. Rachel Reeves clearly had a very specific figure in mind for today's Spending Review. But unlike her predecessors, this was no Labour voter. Her Spending Review was laser-focused on Nigel Farage. Between a laundry list of spending pledges that would have you believe Britain is in a boom, Reeves took aim at Farage. She castigated him for backing Liz Truss's mini-budget and for spending too much time at the pub (arguably one of his best attributes). However, in choosing such tangential attacks, Reeves only drew attention to Labour's fear of Farage. Labour's spending commitments confirmed they view 2029 as a two-way fight with Reform. Record funding was announced for Scotland and Wales, ahead of local elections next year in which Reform are expected to wipe the floor. Days after Farage put steel-making front and centre of his campaign for Wales – at Port Talbot, no less – Reeves made sure to underline Labour's commitment to the steel industry, reconfirming half a billion for Tata Steel. This was paired with a cash injection for up to 350 of the most deprived communities: 'Funding to improve parks, youth facilities, swimming pools and libraries', with a focus on jobs, community assets and regeneration. In the absence of a plan to deliver real wage growth and long sought-after 'renewal', Reeves is hoping that, come the next election, quick and dirty projects can be plastered onto the leaflets of Labour MPs, in time for them to claim they have actually delivered change. You don't need to look far back to see whether or not this will work. It was not that long ago that the Conservatives also gave eye-watering sums to the NHS and tried to cling on to the Red Wall with an almost identical 'levelling up' plan, based on pots of funding for local regeneration projects. They too had Green Book reviews and bus fare caps, as recycled by Reeves today. So why double down on a strategy that was hardly popular with the electorate? With Starmer's 'missions' – of which only one even got a mention from Reeves today – so closely echoing the last government's 'five priorities', you'd be forgiven for thinking that Labour strategists are suffering from collective amnesia. Labour's failure to learn from recent political history speaks to their arrogance, rooted in a deeply held belief that Britain's problems are the result of '14 years of Conservative government'. It's why they came into No. 10 with no plan or narrative for what they wanted to achieve in government. And it's why they are pursuing the same strategy, choosing the same policies, to be implemented by the same group of civil servants – yet expecting a different result. The winner? Nigel Farage.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
What to know after anti-immigrant violence flares in a Northern Ireland town
Police in Northern Ireland say 17 officers were injured during a second night of anti-immigrant violence in the town of Ballymena, where rioters threw bricks, bottles, petrol bombs and fireworks and set several vehicles and houses on fire. Police used water cannon and fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of several hundred people. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said Wednesday that the violence died down by about 1 a.m. Five people were arrested on suspicion of 'riotous behavior.' What sparked the violence Violence erupted Monday after a peaceful march to show support for the family of the victim of an alleged sexual assault on the weekend. Two 14-year-old boys have been charged. The suspects have not been identified because of their age. They were supported in court by a Romanian interpreter. After the march, a crowd of mostly young people set several houses on fire and pelted police with projectiles. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said 15 officers were injured that night. There were similar scenes after dark on Tuesday, as well as small pockets of disorder in several other Northern Ireland towns. Police said agitators on social media were helping fuel what Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson called 'racist thuggery.' The town's history Some politicians said immigration had strained the town of about 30,000 some 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Belfast, long known as a bastion of hardline pro-British Loyalism. Jim Allister, leader of the conservative party Traditional Unionist Voice, said 'unchecked migration, which is beyond what the town can cope with, is a source of past and future tensions.' Some Romanians in Ballymena told Britain's PA news agency they had lived in the town for years and were shocked by the violence. Several houses in the Clonavon Terrace area that was the focus of the violence put up signs identifying their residents as British or Filipino in an apparent attempt to avoid being targeted. Henderson said there was no evidence that Loyalist paramilitaries, who still hold sway over Protestant communities, were behind the disorder. Past Northern Ireland history Northern Ireland has a long history of street disorder stretching back to tensions between the British unionist and Irish nationalist communities. Though three decades of violence known as 'the Troubles' largely ended after a 1998 peace accord, tensions remain between those — largely Protestants — who see themselves as British and Irish nationalists, who are mostly Catholic. In Belfast, 'peace walls' still separate working-class Protestant and Catholic areas. Street rioters sporadically clash with police, and recently immigrants have become a target. Anti-immigrant violence erupted in Northern Ireland as well as England last year after three girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the northwest England town of Southport. Authorities said online misinformation wrongly identifying the U.K.-born teenage attacker as a migrant played a part. Government appeals for calm Police condemned the latest violence and said they would call in officers from England and Wales to bolster their response if needed. All the parties in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government issued a joint statement appealing for calm and urging people to reject 'the divisive agenda being pursued by a minority of destructive, bad faith actors." On the alleged sexual assault, the statement added that 'it is paramount that the justice process is now allowed to take its course so that this heinous crime can be robustly investigated. Those weaponizing the situation in order to sow racial tensions do not care about seeing justice and have nothing to offer their communities but division and disorder.'
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Did ChatGPT get the spending review right? Treasury minister gives his verdict
The chief secretary to the Treasury has called the Sky News-Chat GPT spending review projection "pretty good" and scored it 70%. Darren Jones compared the real spending review, delivered by Rachel Reeves on Wednesday, and the Sky News AI (artificial intelligence) projection last week. Sky News took the Treasury's spring statement, past spending reviews, the 'main estimates' from the Treasury website, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies' projections, and put them into ChatGPT, asking it to calculate the winners and losers in the spending review. This was done 10 days ahead of the review - before several departments had agreed their budgets with the Treasury - on the basis of projections based on those public documents. It also comes amid a big debate kicked off by Sky News about the level of error of AI. The Sky News-AI projection correctly put defence and health as the biggest winners, the Foreign Office as the biggest loser, and identified many departments would lose out in real terms overall. It suggested the education budget would be smaller than it turned out, but correctly highlighted the challenges for departments like the Home Office and environment. Watch what happened with Sky's AI-generated spending review 1:31 Reviewing the exercise, the author of the real spending review told Sky News that this pioneering use of AI was "pretty, pretty good". He added: "I could be out of a job next time in 2027, which to be honest, it's not a bad idea given the process I've just had to go through." The Treasury made a number of accounting changes to so-called "mega projects" which AI could not have anticipated, and changed some of the numbers. 3:43 Asked to give it a score, Mr Jones replied: "I'm going to give it 70%." The spending review includes AI as a tool to save money in various government processes.
