In case anyone has missed it (make that most people rather than anyone), Latvia has taken on the rotating presidency of the European Union. So, naturally, their representatives have been presenting plans for the next six months and, we have to assume, somewhere among those plans there is the usual one about cutting red tape and encouraging business and entrepreneurship.

Here is what the Minister of Agriculture Janis Duklavs said to the Committee for Fisheries (PECH) in the European Parliament:

Multiannual management plan for Baltic Sea cod, Baltic herring and sprat stocks is the first multiannual fishing plan of the new generation. This file is essential for ensuring sustainability of the stocks and at the same time offers more predictability and certainty to the industry. The proposal is therefore on the top of the Presidency’s priorities.

Proposal for Regulation on introduction of the landing obligation: the Latvian Presidency will be fully involved in the outstanding work on the new rules. The obligation to land some fish species entered into force on 1 January this year, but fishermen still have no clear rules on the application. The EU institutional agreement on this file should be completed as soon as possible.

External dimension of fisheries (sustainable fishing partnership agreements with third countries, negotiations with coastal states and representation in international organizations): the Minister underlined the importance of fisheries agreements for a viable and competitive EU fishing fleet in high-seas. It is expected that the work on negotiations for agreements with Mauritania, Kiribati, Seychelles and other countries would be smoothly continued in the first half of 2015.

Let us note immediately the reference to the "competitive EU fishing fleet". Whether it is competitive or not is irrelevant. Nothing much in the EU is competitive, after all. The point is that it is an EU fishing fleet. Or, let me spell it out, for the benefit of politicians, should they bother to read this blog, no amount of reforming has changed the fact that the UK (and that would have been true for a Scotland "independent within the EU) has no fishing fleet of its own while the country remains part of the Common Fisheries Policy, that is, part of the European Union.

That, of course, applies to the internal arrangements as well. Decisions will be taken for political reasons at the centre and relayed down to the regional institutions for them to implement. That, in essence, is the extent of those much-vaunted reforms.