Latest news with #fishingrights
The Sun
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Starmer has planted a bomb beneath our democracy… reopening Brexit wounds means next election will be another revolt
THERE is an old saying in British politics that 'no government can bind the hands of its successor' – meaning that Parliament can always vote to undo unpopular laws. But whoever came up with the phrase hadn't reckoned with Keir Starmer and his 'reset' of relations with the EU. 2 The Prime Minister has not just surrendered to the EU on many of its demands — he has planted a large bomb beneath our democracy. Should a future government try to cancel his deal to grant EU fishing boats access to our waters, it will trigger a clause whereby the EU is allowed to levy punitive tariffs on all UK exports, effectively cancelling the free-trade deal negotiated by Boris Johnson. It is a similar story with Starmer's agreement to obey the EU's diktats on Net Zero. Britain is now tied to the EU's regime for carbon taxes. Ed Miliband may be a menace who is costing our households and industries a fortune, but at least we can get rid of him through the ballot box. Not so the European Court of Justice — the EU's own court — which will now be allowed to dictate UK climate policy. 'Reopened old wounds' Indeed, many government ministers have been reduced to an irrelevance. Thanks to Starmer's deal, Britain will once again be obliged to follow laws on food standards laid down by Brussels, under so-called 'dynamic alignment' with EU rules. The only difference compared with our years of EU membership is that we will no longer have a say in what those laws should be. It may mean the end, for example, of the few freedoms which Britain has chosen to exercise. The UK's embryonic industry of gene-edited crops — which promises an agricultural revolution, allowing higher yields and less use of pesticides — is now at risk of being squashed by heavy-handed EU regulation. 'Sell-out' Starmer has betrayed Brexit – he should follow in Trump's footsteps instead And then, of course, there is free movement. If there is one issue above all others which motivated a majority of Britons to vote Leave in 2016, it was the opportunity to control our borders — not to eliminate migration, but to ensure those who come to Britain are contributing to the economy rather than feeding off it. True, no government of the past five years has succeeded in trimming net migration, but now Starmer is once again opening our doors to low-paid migrants, through his agreement to a youth mobility scheme. And what has he won us in return? The promise of shorter queues at passport control when we holiday in EU countries — one of his main selling points for the deal — is an illusion. All that the agreement does is state that it will not be against EU laws for individual countries to allow UK citizens to use e-gates at ports and airports. Whether those countries choose to allow British travellers to do this will be up to them. Starmer wants us to think that his deal will draw a line under the UK's relationship with the EU. The years of 'stale debate', he tells us, are over. Sorry, but what he has achieved is the exact opposite. Few, if anyone, outside the Government are going to be pleased by Starmer's reset. Ross Clark He has reopened old wounds by revisiting the long, painful years of Brexit negotiations. What he should be doing is seizing full advantage of the UK's new found freedoms to make us more growth-friendly, escaping from the EU's low trajectory. Instead, he has turned Britain into the 'vassal state' which many people feared — where we have to accept the rules the EU throws at us without having a seat at the table. Few, if anyone, outside the Government are going to be pleased by Starmer's reset. For ardent Remainers, it won't have gone far enough. They will see it as a stepping stone towards their ultimate aim of rejoining the EU as a full member. Those who voted Leave, on the other hand, will feel horribly cheated. The 2016 referendum was partly a popular revolt against the political classes who, for too long, had tried to ride roughshod over democratic opinion. 'Contempt for democracy' Britain was taken into the EU without a referendum, an essential act of legitimising significant constitutional changes. We only had the referendum in 1975, two years after Edward Heath had taken us in as a fait accompli. For the following 40 years we were never allowed to vote as the EU, treaty by treaty, gradually tightened its grip on Britain, expanding its reach into every aspect of our lives. In 2016, the political establishment couldn't believe what had happened, and they have been plotting ever since to undo the Brexit vote. In Starmer they have found a willing co-conspirator. But in no sense does this week's agreement settle Brexit for good. On the contrary, it merely ensures that at the next election there will be another revolt against the lanyard-wearing elite who show such contempt for democracy. However much Starmer has tried to make his reset irreversible, Brexit is going to come roaring back as a topic of political debate.
The Sun
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Nigel Farage slammed for ‘not getting up from sunbed' as he skips crunch EU deal debate
NIGEL Farage has come under fire for not "getting up from his sunbed" while skipping a Commons debate on the new controversial EU deal. The Reform UK leader admitted he was away from Westminster on his first overseas holiday for three years amid speculation he is in France. 2 Opponents pounced on the revelation from the leading Brexiteer just 24 hours after Sir Keir Starmer struck his "surrender" deal with the EU. He was not present in Parliament on Tuesday when the PM debated the agreement with MPs. Mr Farage revealed his fury over the agreement, claiming a 12-year deal with the EU on fishing rights could trigger the end of the sector. Labour said: 'Nigel Farage clearly cares so passionately about this issue he's decided he can't get up from his sunbed to represent his constituents or his party. 'He's not a leader – he's an opportunist who just talks Britain down whenever it suits him." A Tory spokesman said the MP for Clacton, Essex, doesn't have "the stamina to keep up with Starmer". Farage said he will be back on the campaign trail next week as his party "moves to the next stage" following the local election wins and victory in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. He said: "After months of touring the UK in the run up to our hugely successful local election campaign, I will resume travelling the country next week as Reform moves to the next stage. "Meanwhile I am having my first overseas break for three years, the jungle excepted. "Well I say break.. plenty of articles and fundraising calls!"
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Next year, we were getting our fisheries back under Brexit. Starmer wasn't having that
There's a lot of bad stuff in Keir Starmer's sellout deal with the EU, but among the worst is the extension of the fisheries transition period by an incredible twelve years, to 2038, more than double the length of the original transition Boris Johnson and I reluctantly accepted in 2020. Starmer tries to claim this provides 'stability'. This is not just a misunderstanding, it is actively misleading. To understand why, you have to look back. Fisheries was the last part of the 2020 agreement to be finalised, at 3pm on Christmas Eve. The EU side had given us inaccurate quota numbers, deliberately miscalculated Euro/Sterling exchange rates, and refused to back off, almost collapsing the entire agreement at the last moment. Fortunately, they saw sense, we redid the numbers, and the agreement gave us most of what we wanted. The deal made Britain an independent coastal state once again. (The great Charles Moore says it didn't in his Monday column: I hate to correct him, but even Homer nods, and the Treaty is clear: 'with effect from 1 January 2021, the United Kingdom is an independent coastal State with corresponding rights and obligations under international law.') We left the dreadful Common Fisheries Policy which set catches and quotas by majority vote and which had nearly destroyed North Sea fishing grounds. We got back the right to manage the environment in our own waters. EU fishing boats needed access licences and only got them on certain conditions. It would be back to normal. Finally, and most importantly, we got back the right to agree annual catches and annual quotas with our neighbours. Because the Common Fisheries Policy was heavily biased against UK fisheries from the beginning (indeed, in the last years before Brexit, EU boats caught five times more fish by value in our waters than we did) it was inevitable that they would rapidly produce a significant further increase in UK catch. If that couldn't be agreed collaboratively, well, we could always close some or all of our waters to anyone other than Brits. That might mean some sort of retaliation, but that was a trade-off we could decide for ourselves. The only problem was that we had to agree a transition to these annual negotiations, of five and a half years. During it, the 2020 quotas would be uplifted in our favour by 25 per cent, but would otherwise be fixed. On 1 July 2026, all this would be over. Reluctantly, we thought this justifiable in the interests of securing the wider trade agreement and avoiding a further shock to the economy in the depths of pandemic misery that dreadful Christmas. Our fisheries industry in general wanted a shorter transition and higher quotas sooner. I don't blame them, though I do think their disappointment led them to exaggerate the criticism. After all, in 2023 (the latest full figures available) UK vessels landed 14 per cent more fish than in 2019. That it was a deal in our favour is shown by the fact the French hated it, posturing and grumbling from the beginning, and threatening to blockade Jersey and cut off electricity supplies in that first autumn in an attempt to evade its terms. Be that as it may, whatever you thought of the transition, it is, or was, almost over. In a year and a month we would be exactly like any other fishing nation. But no. Starmer's deal has extended it for another 12 years. Starmer is trying to claim that because this is our 2020 deal there should be no difficulty in extending it. That is absurd. The point of our transition was that it ended. Suppose you get divorced and agree to pay your spouse maintenance for five years. You're not going to be happy if you are suddenly told you have to pay it for another twelve, and that it really shouldn't be a problem for you because, after all, it's only the same amount you originally agreed. It's a massive change to terms and expectations. The money you thought you had available you no longer have. Everything is different. So it is for fishing communities on the back of Starmer's wretched deal. Many fishermen will now never see the quota increases they could have expected. Some will have invested in that expectation and now see that undermined. And why will anyone put in money in future when it's already clear there is no prospect of increasing the size of the market? This time our fishing communities really have been sold out. Our deal may not have been perfect, but at least we got the biggest, widest, and deepest trade agreement ever in return. What has Starmer got? The right to subject ourselves to EU laws and courts in perpetuity. He's conceded one thing we don't want to get something else we don't want. This farcical reset does nothing but take us back closer to EU control, and our fishermen are its victims.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The Daily T: Reform up, Tories down - Can Kemi survive the Brexit reset bloodbath?
Twenty-four hours after Keir Starmer announced a major concession on fishing rights amid closer alignment with the EU, and the backlash has been brutal. Reform are already expecting to take seats from Labour in the next General Election in the aftermath of the government's Brexit 'reset' deal, with deputy leader Richard Tice accusing Starmer of having 'surrendered the fishing industry' to the EU. On today's episode, Camilla and Kamal unpack the fallout from the Prime Minister's big 'reset' and analyse the key moments from both his statement in Parliament and leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch's fiery response as the Tories slip to fourth place behind Labour, Reform and the Lib Dems in a major new poll. And it was one of Britain's biggest medical scandals. Thousands were infected with HIV and hepatitis through contaminated blood products in the 70s and 80s, including children at a specialist school called Treloar's. Camilla speaks to Richard Warwick, a survivor, and journalist and author Cara McGoogan ahead of a new ITV documentary on the scandal and why survivors still haven't had their compensation.
The Independent
20-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
How pro-Brexit media responded to Starmer's UK-EU reset
Sir Keir Starmer has secured a landmark deal between Britain and the European Union in a move that has dominated headlines across the political spectrum. Following a last-minute breakthrough in reset talks, the prime minister – who has made the Brexit reset a centrepiece of his administration – hailed Monday's summit as marking a 'new era' of relations with the bloc. While Sir Keir declared that Britain was 'back on the world stage' with his 'win-win' deal, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage made it clear that they would scrap it if they were to win power at the next election. Ms Badenoch warned the agreement makes the UK 'a rule taker', while the former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader branded it an 'abject surrender' and 'the end of the fishing industry'. Especially thorny issues included fishing rights, which negotiators only solved in the early hours of the morning, while talks surrounding a youth mobility scheme appear to have ended in a deadlock. Unsurprisingly for the Brexit debate, Tuesday's front pages highlighted the stark political divides, with the Daily Mail echoing Mr Farage's remarks with the headline 'Starmer's surrender' and the Guardian leading with the prime minister's declaration of success. The Independent takes a look at how the more pro-Brexit media covered the deal. The Daily Mail, which was known to be among the most pro-Leave media, unsurprisingly blasted Mr Starmer and his deal with the headline 'Starmer's surrender'. Leading with the backlash, the paper reported the prime minister has been 'accused of a great Brexit betrayal', suggesting the agreement gives Brussels control over British fish, laws and money. The Daily Express led with a similar headline to the Mail, citing a quote that Sir Keir's agreement is an 'abject surrender' and condemning it as a 'betrayal of Brexit Britain'. The paper included critics' warnings that the deal means Britain is in a 'new era of Brussels rule', echoing Sir Keir's 'new era' remarks. Daily Star The Daily Star similarly led on criticism of the deal, with the headline: 'PM's in a tight spot.' The paper features quotes from pro-Leave former prime minister Boris Johnson who called Sir Keir an 'orange ball-chewing Brussels gimp'. The Sun The Sun also headlines on backlash against the agreement, focusing on fishing rights. The newspaper's front page states: 'Done up like a kipper.' It reported that Britain was ambushed by a last-minute demand by what it called '12 more years of French and Spanish trawlers plundering our waters'. The paper also writes that Sir Keir agreed to 'take rules from Brussels' among a list of criticisms of the deal. The Daily Telegraph described the deal as an official 'kiss goodbye to Brexit'. The paper reported on critics accusations the prime minister is trying to drag Britain back into the bloc. Matt's cartoon, meanwhile, showed fisherman on a British-flagged vessel with the line: 'We took back control, but they took back all the mackerel, sole and haddock.'
