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Press and Journal
19-05-2025
- Business
- Press and Journal
'Horror show' trade deal for Scots fishing fleet
North-east fishing chief Mike Park and his industry peers have angrily branded PM Sir Keir Starmer's trade deal with the EU as an 'utter betrayal'. EU boats will have had their current level of access to key UK fishing grounds extended for a further 12 years. Details of the trade pact struck between prime minister Sir Keir and EU counterparts emerged earlier today. The UK Government has claimed it will protect British fishing access, rights and areas. There is no increase in the amount of fish EU vessels can catch in UK waters, it said. According to the government, this provides 'stability and certainty' for the sector. But Scottish fishing chiefs are outraged by the package agreed with Brussels. They see it as another blow to the Scottish sector after two-previous major let-downs. The UK's controversial entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 ushered in the much-despised Common Fisheries Policy. And the Brexit trade deal negotiated by former PM Boris Johnson was a big disappointment for the industry. Mike Park, Stonehaven-based chief executive of the Scottish White Fish Producers' Association, said: 'It's an utter betrayal of the fishing industry for the third time. 'Whereas the (EU) exit deal was significantly worse than expected, the mechanisms through which the industry could renegotiate has now also been removed.' Scottish Fishermen's Federation chief executive Elspeth Macdonald said: 'This deal is a horror show for Scottish fishermen, far worse than Boris Johnson's botched Brexit agreement. ''It is clear Sir Keir Starmer made the whole deal on the backs of our fishermen and coastal communities, granting EU vessels 12 years of continuous access to UK waters at the last minute in order secure other objectives.' Ms Macdonald added: 'This highlights the total indifference of the British political establishment to the interests of our fishing sector, with Sir Keir becoming the third prime minister after Edward Heath and Johnson to betray the industry. 'Any attempt by either the UK or EU to portray the new deal as a continuation of existing arrangements would be a lie. 'The Trade and Co-operation Agreement (Brexit deal) paved the way for annual access negotiations from 2026. 'At the weekend, Sir Keir said the deal would be measured against how much it would improve job prospects and allow our communities to flourish. 'Giving away a national asset such as our rich and healthy fishing grounds for no discernible benefit not only fails both of these tests, but is a disgrace that will ensure the enmity of this proud industry for many years to come.' The government pledged to 'back coastal communities' by investing £360 million in new technology and equipment to modernise the UK fleet, training to help upskill the workforce, and funding to support tourism and boost seafood exports. As part of the deal, new SPS measures will make it easier for food and drink to be imported and exported by slashing costs and red tape. Sir Keir hailed the agreement as 'good for jobs, good for bills, and good for our borders'. But Gordon and Buchan Conservative MP Harriet Cross branded it 'Starmer's surrender'. She called it 'one of the biggest acts of betrayal that our fishing industry has seen in Scotland'. Ms Cross added: 'Our fishermen have been used as a pawn by Keir Starmer, which will result in catastrophic consequences for our coastal communities. 'This is a complete abandonment of our fishing fleets, when the industry should be benefiting from the opportunities presented by leaving the EU and the Common Fisheries Policy.' Meanwhile, Orkney and Shetland Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael called the deal 'deeply disappointing'. He added: ' Fishermen were hoping for a reset after the incompetence of the previous Tory government in protecting fishing interests. 'Instead, it seems that the stench of Boris Johnson's bungled 2020 deal will linger over us for a generation. 'If there is a silver lining for fishermen it will be in easements for trade and stability for key export markets – but that is still far from the 'sea of opportunity' that was promised in the past.'
Scotsman
18-05-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
How UK immigration restrictions will make Scottish fishing's future 'difficult'
Sign up to our Politics newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The UK government's overhaul of immigration makes it 'difficult' to see a sustainable future for the Scottish fishing industry, industry experts have claimed. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a raft of tighter restrictions on visas in a bid to bring down net migration, including scrapping care worker visas completely, and increasing the requirements for skilled worker visas. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Prime Minister says employers should instead be training up UK workers rather than recruiting from overseas. Danish trawler fishing for sandeels with gannets & kittiwakes. picture: Chris Gomersall. | Chris Gomersall However, Scottish fishing experts say they are 'very concerned' about the impact this will have on the sector, as it is 'dependent' on overseas labour. Around a third of the workforce come from outside the UK, and ever since Brexit the industry has been grappling with visa difficulties. In the initial post-Brexit days, most overseas fishermen came on a transit visa, allowing them to move through Scotland to board a vessel that will go on to fish in international waters. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad However, new rules came into force in 2023 banning anyone on a transit visa from working on fishing boats. Instead, they needed a skilled worker visa, which has a higher English language requirement. The industry has consistently campaigned for a language exemption for fishermen on this type of visa, as many do not have the language skills required. This week's immigration changes now mean those on skilled worker visas need even higher language skills and to be educated to degree level - something the industry says is not feasible. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mike Park, from the Scottish White Fish Producers' Association, said: 'We have just moved from transit visas to skilled worker visas and have all the concerns that come with that. Mike Park, Scottish White Fish Producers' Association | Supplied 'If the government puts in more measures to make it difficult to achieve that, it is difficult to see where the industry goes. Getting fishermen into the industry domestically is very difficult, it is almost impossible, so I am very much concerned. 'The government needs to understand that the folk coming from overseas are working class and are not exposed to English and higher education. We are already struggling to get the sector aligned to the current standards, and increasing them for the fishing industry will be a real challenge.' Mr Park said the industry was 'doing everything it can' to recruit within Scotland, but stressed it was not an attractive career choice. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He said: 'The reality is more and more youngsters are going to further education and when they come out wanting a marine career, there is the Royal Navy, merchant navy, offshore oil and gas, salmon fishing and renewables. Fishing has uncertainty and on whether you are at home or at sea, which makes us the last choice. 'It is very, very difficult. 'The government needs to understand some sectors like ours are more under pressure than others, so rather than thinking about immigration as a whole, they should look at specific sectors and come up with specific solutions.' Alistair Bally-Philp, from the Scottish Creel Fishermen's Federation, said the changes would have a 'dramatically negative effect' on the industry. Alistair Bally-Philp, Scottish Creel Fishermen's Federation | Supplied He said: 'Trawlers and dredgers offshore are reliant on foreign labour and if the government is making it harder to open up the market to these workers, it will put a lot of pressure on the industry. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'There is the potential to train up local people and UK nationals, but the industry is not appealing because of working conditions, sustainability and rates of pay. 'In the UK, people don't see it as a long-term career with good wages. It will have a dramatically negative effect on the larger mobile sector.' The UK Home Office says its immigration white paper aims to reduce the reliance on international recruitment, and says while it understands the industry's labour shortages concerns, it needs to address the fundamental issues of remote locations, working conditions and pay.
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- The Guardian
We now leave navigation to our phones. The result: more of us are getting hopelessly lost
It does not involve protest or violence, but it might be the quintessential human image of our times: a small group of people in the midst of spectacular natural scenery, drawn there in the certainty that the apps on their phones could somehow get them from A to B to C – but utterly, hopelessly lost. Two weeks ago, Mountain Rescue England and Wales published figures showing a record number of annual callouts. For the first time, in fact, teams – of overworked volunteers, mostly – had been called out on every day of the year. Between 2019 and 2024, the total number of rescues had increased by 24%, and there was a marked jump among the 18 to 24 age group, among whom callouts almost doubled. Similar trends were evident in data from Scotland: across Britain, there is evidently a mounting problem about the gap between people's urge to experience wild and open spaces, and their ability to cope when they actually get there. The Guardian's report included an incisive quotation from Mike Park, the chief executive of Mountain Rescue England and Wales, who talked about incidents in the Lake District, Eryri (Snowdonia), Northumberland and other places. 'We know from incident reports that more and more people are tempted into risky locations by Instagram posts and the navigation apps being used aren't always suitable for an outdoor environment,' he said. Whatever people found online either underplayed or completely ignored what he called 'the hazards and context' – or, put more bluntly, the real world. Welcome, then, to yet another version of a familiar story: how seemingly infallible technology turns out to be nothing of the kind. Superficially, digital navigation based on GPS tech seems massively empowering. In most of our everyday environments, that promise usually just about holds true. But it is also quintessentially infantilising, leaving us unable to get around without it, or cope with its shortcomings. Most of us know the horror and panic that comes with sudden battery loss in an unfamiliar place, and that weird sense of being cut adrift from basic skills that human beings have had since they learned to walk upright (if not before). But those hapless souls getting lost up mountains have confronted something even more fear-inducing: that once you are away from roads and built-up environments, many of the most dependable apps suddenly run out of detailed information. When that happens, do we even have the skills any more to find our way back to safety? In 2020, neuroscientists based at McGill University in Montreal published research suggesting that 'people with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation'. Thirteen of their participants were retested three years after the initial research, when they found that 'greater GPS use since initial testing was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory'. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that deals with navigation: among London taxi drivers, the need to memorise so many geographical details was found to cause it to increase in size. But here were findings that suggested the opposite: reliance on automated directions reducing people's capacity to navigate for themselves. There is something even more profound and insidious at work here. On our phones, all that really matters is an archetypal blue dot, representing a single individual. As the writer and academic Jerry Brotton puts it in his brilliant book Four Points of the Compass – published last year – this represents 'the most extreme expression of a long history of egocentric mapping'. Anyone familiar with the history of ancient Rome will recall Ptolemy, the mathematician and astronomer who believed that the planets of the solar system, along with the sun, revolved around the Earth. Here is our delusional modern equivalent: a version of reality that puts us at the centre of everything. It also offers no clues about what awaits us further along the route: the journey just unfolds by increments. Worse still, what the most-used navigation apps – Google and Apple maps – most clearly show is the location of shops and restaurants, embodying the sense that, as Brotton puts it, 'what matters most is where we stand and how we consume, often at the expense of an immersive understanding of and interaction with our physical domain'. The result is that 'individuals online can be virtually connected but environmentally detached from the surrounding world, inhabiting a confused realm of spatial illiteracy'. If that can happen even in towns and cities, what hope have we got amid fells, lochs and forests? Wanting to believe you are omniscient while constantly running the risk of accident and disaster might be the basis of the human condition, but the revolution in human thinking caused by the internet seems to have taken it to a surreal new extreme. It is surely telling that amid the endless profusion of apps designed to tell us where we are, how fast or slow our heart is beating and the latest news headlines, the word that seems to constantly crop up in articles about the way we now live is 'disorientation'. In that sense, people's inability to find their way through the physical world reflects our declining skills at navigation more generally – and through information in particular. These are the consequences of the 21st century's insistence that everything must be personalised: it distorts our understanding of the world to the point of near-fiction. And so, at the risk of sounding like someone's dad, to some practical advice. If anyone is thinking of venturing into the wild but unsure of how to avoid disaster, I'd recommend the Ordnance Survey's peerless phone app – which requires a subscription – and a paper map as a back-up, either in the form of the full fold-out version, or a relevant section shown in a reliable guidebook. Always carry a compass. Before you set off, do what the blue dot discourages, and cast your eyes across the whole route, mindful of the aforementioned hazards and context, and what apps underplay or omit: bogs, high streams and rivers, steep gradients. More broadly, we clearly need to talk about improving people's understanding of what the countryside is like up close, and how to get around it – a conversation that might revive interest in the much-mocked subject of geography. Here, perhaps, is the key to reconnecting the world we see on our phones and the one we have to actually deal with. That is the breach that needs to be healed: if it isn't, even more generations will find themselves lost, in every sense of the word. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Telegraph
16-04-2025
- Telegraph
Social media blamed for record rise in mountain rescue call-outs
Social media and poor-quality navigation apps have been blamed for a record number of call-outs for mountain rescue services, a study suggests. Last year was the first time rescue teams in England and Wales were called out every day of the year. Whereas in pre-pandemic times the most rescued age group was 50-54, today it is the 18- 24-year-olds who are most likely to run into difficulties, partly driven by the craze for selfies at some of the UK's most remote beauty spots. Overall, data from Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW) and visualised by Ordnance Survey revealed a 24 per cent rise in the number of rescues over the last five years – reaching almost 4,000. The service has attributed the change to a growth in the popularity of honeypot locations promoted and shared on social media, as well as younger audiences relying on mobile phone apps that lack the accurate detail required to navigate safely in remote areas. Mike Park, the MREW chief executive, said: 'To say that there wasn't a single day in 2024 without a call-out shows one aspect of how busy mountain rescue teams have been. 'But it's only part of the story. The busiest teams are often seeing multiple call-outs running in parallel with all the demands that puts on unpaid volunteers, their employers, friends and families.' Referencing the change in demographics, Mr Park said: 'It's hard for us to give a definitive reason for the age group change. 'But we know from incident reports that more and more people are tempted into risky locations by Instagram posts and the navigation apps being used aren't always suitable for an outdoor environment. 'Add to that a tendency to follow popular routes online without knowing the hazards and context, and it's not surprising that those likely to be relying most on their phones are the ones getting into difficulties.' The locations with the largest increase in call-outs between 2019 and 2024 were Snowdonia in North Wales, the Lake District and Peak District. The busiest teams were in Llanberis and Ogwen Valley in the Snowdonia National Park.
