It has to be one of the most bizarre moments from the lead-up to the EU referendum.
Sailing valiantly up the Thames, Brexit poster boy Nigel Farage grinned at the head of an armada of fishing boats en route to Westminster, loudly calling for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.
But suddenly, under the shadow of Tower Bridge, a handful of dinghies launched a surprise “attack” to intercept the flotilla, led by none other than Bob Geldof.
“You are no fisherman’s friend... You are a fraud,” yelled the founder of Band Aid at Farage as Remain supporters waved “In” flags in the London breeze.
This outlandish scene was followed by a trade of colourful insults across the muddy water before a reported exchange of hose fire with Geldof’s vessel.
Back on dry land, Farage blasted Geldof for the “pretty disgraceful” spectacle and accused him of showing “absolute contempt” for fishermen and women supporting the Leave river protest under the “Fishing for Leave” banner.
The group endorsed a pledge that Britain would take back control of UK waters. And so did the vast majority of the country’s fishing community, with nine out of 10 saying they intended to vote for Brexit.
A few days later, they got what they wanted in the referendum. But today, a decade on from the vote to leave the EU, many in the fishing community say their industry was betrayed after promises that Britain would regain control of its waters.
“We feel betrayed, because we were convinced, promised, we were going to get these basic points – with the failure to uphold a limit on foreign vessels fishing with 12 nautical miles from the UK coast being the biggest let-down,” says fisherman Anthony Hoskin, at Newlyn Harbour in Cornwall.
Hoskin is sitting with Andy Wheeler, assistant to the chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers’ Organisation (CFPO), in the cooperative’s modest offices overlooking the stone-walled harbour, which dates back to 1435. At one end of the harbour arm is a Victorian building that once served as a “fisherman’s rest” more than a century ago.
It’s a bright afternoon, and several fishing vessels – a mix of beam trawlers and crabbing boats – are slowly entering the blue-water harbour, where workers are busy loading huge arctic lorries destined for places as far away as Portugal.
“The one thing you can rely on with our politicians is they are going to make a mess of it,” Hoskin continues. “The idea for Brexit was good, but the people we had, the people we always have, they all seemed to be very weak and didn’t have an understanding of our industry. We were ultimately betrayed.”
Since the 1970s, under the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU, European vessels were allowed to fish as near as six nautical miles off Britain’s coast. As part of the Leave campaign, it was hoped by many that the exclusion zone would be pushed back to 12 nautical miles.
But the UK did not negotiate an exclusion of EU fishing fleets. Instead, Boris Johnson agreed to an uplift in fishing quotas for UK vessels over a five-year transition period – until last year, when Keir Starmer extended the arrangement, allowing European vessels to operate in UK waters until 2038.
At his desk, Wheeler recalls Farage visiting Newlyn, England’s biggest fishing port, ahead of the Brexit referendum. Other politicians took the same campaign route to the town, some 300 miles from London, in the months leading up to the vote.
“Fishing pulls on the heartstrings of the nation, and they [Leave campaigners] really tried to tap into it with promises over sovereignty,” says Wheeler.
“But if you harness the fact that fishing is such a low percentage of GDP [0.05 per cent], then all these promises, they were never going to come to fruition, because of the required trade-offs in the Brexit negotiations. Fishing was going to come last in the priorities.”
One of Wheeler’s jobs is to divide the dozens of quotas for fishing species among his group’s 150-or-so members. His job is to also warn foreign vessels away from shellfish pots laid down by UK boats, particularly in waters within 12 nautical miles of the coast.
Using WhatsApp and a live map of marine traffic, he messages a French vessel about a 16-square-mile area where pots have been anchored. The French crew, on this occasion, appear to oblige – but it’s not always the case.
During storms, when many smaller UK vessels are forced to harbour, French trawlers often use the headland at the southern tip of Cornwall as a shelter to continue to fish day and night, leading to weekly conflict with UK-laid pots.
“It’s £100 a pot, and thousands of pounds for new rope,” says fisherman Richard Carroll, who is down in the harbour feeding replacement rope through a machine for his pots after damage caused by trawlers in December.
Carroll, who is skipper of the blue-painted Winter of Ladram, says he spends £60,000 to £70,000 on new pots and ropes every year, and despite attempts to reclaim these costs from a list of ships he reels off, he says he has “not received a penny”.
The 49-year-old says: “I’m fishing in UK fishing waters, but my gear is being damaged by foreign vessels who ignore our messages. How is that fair? Imagine if we did the same in French waters, there’d be an outbreak of war.”
Carroll, who works for a fishing company called Waterdance, also blames Brexit for the difficulties he has employing crew, with complications over paperwork meaning that previous employees have had to leave. He now has six Latvians on board. “Good workers,” he says.
Further down the harbour is Josh Dornam, a 34-year-old fisherman, who has been forced to return from Holland because of a rise in exporting costs post-Brexit. “I voted for Brexit because I thought it was going to help the fishing industry – but it was all based on lies,” he says.
Brexit voter Phil Mitchell, 55, is in charge of a beamer catching fish including lemon sole and monkfish. He says a failure to stop foreign vessels from fishing in UK waters was the biggest let-down of the Brexit deal.
“When the weather gets bad, they [French and Belgian vessels] can continue to fish, so when we come out we find the stock low.
“The idea [of Brexit] was you could control your waters and push the fellows [foreign vessels] out, which hasn’t happened. We’ve been far too weak, and the quotas have also been far too small. It’s disgusting.”
The failure to keep these promises was reflected on by Conservative environment minister George Eustice, in a local BBC phone-in five years ago. Eustice, who lost his Cornwall seat of Camborne and Redruth at the last general election, admitted: “We didn’t achieve as much as we hoped on fishing, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
An hour’s drive from Newlyn, on the northern shore of the Cornwall coast, is the seaside resort of Newquay.
In a town that flourished as a fishing port in the Victorian era, the 1833-built harbour now has only around 15 fishing vessels, with almost as many fishing-trip boats, charging around £25 for two hours at sea.
In the nearby Red Lion pub, where a battered cod and chips costs £15.95, framed pictures of the harbour show dozens of masted fishing vessels in the man-made cove.
But on the quiet main street (we visit on a Tuesday in March), there’s little evidence of the town’s fishing history. Asked where we can buy a locally caught crab sandwich, the worker at the Travelodge shrugs his shoulders. “Not here,” he says.
Outside, overlooking the picturesque harbour, a shellfisher shares the frustrations of those we spoke with in Newlyn.
“We were all going to be better off as a result of Brexit,” he says.
The man, who runs a vessel with his son, picks up shellfish from around 2,000 pots laid within 12 nautical miles of the north Cornwall coastline.
“We were told there would be no French and Belgian ships towing away our gear, and it’d make our lives easier,” he says. “I wasn’t going to be left unable to sleep knowing my thousands of pounds’ worth of rope and pots could be gone.
“We were even going to have control of our quotas, no dictating from Brussels. But we were sold down the river, simple as that.”
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