Scotland on Sunday had a piece by Richard Lochhead, the Scottish Fisheries Minister, under this curious title: CFP overhaul not radical enough for Scotland's damaged industry. As we seem to recall, one of the SNP's arguments was that a Scottish Parliament was better at looking after Scotland's fish than Westminster. It seems that Mr Lochhead does not think that the Scottish Assembly has achieved that state of affairs. Scotland, in his opinion, has been badly served by the European Commission but, as the commenters point out, his huffing and puffing does not really get to grips with the problem that is at the heart of all his complaints: the CFP itself.

We particularly like the comment by Dr James Wilkie:

The European Union represents half of Europe, and some of the most important fishing states are not even members of it. It has no mandate to speak for Europe, and certainly not to impose the will of the national and multinational corporations whose interests it represents on member states without a shred of genuine democratic legitimation. Its so-called parliament is just window-dressing - a total sham - and in any case what do its members know about fishing in the North Atlantic? What do its Scottish members know about fishing in the North Atlantic?

No amount of tinkering will improve the disastrous EU Common Fisheries Policy. The only remedy is abolition and a fresh start. Since that is automatically blocked by four EU treaties, the only way to save Scotland's fishing industry is to get out.

We received the following communication and think our readers will be interested:

Good Afternoon,

As you are aware, we published our initial proposals to modernise Her Majesty’s Coastguard on 16th December 2010. We received over 1,800 responses to this consultation and an independent team carefully reviewed these responses. We were very grateful for the constructive contributions from all our stakeholders. The review team’s report can be found at (http://www.dft.gov.uk/mca/independent_review_report.pdf)

In addition, the Transport Select Committee conducted its own inquiry, reporting its findings last month.

FAL has issued a press release in response to the so-called Common Fisheries Policy reform, calling it, appropriately enough, The Sinking Titanic.

Baroness Parminter's Question

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to achieve reform of the Common Fisheries Policy.

Statement made both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords about the last Agriculture and Fisheries Council on June 28, attended Richard Benyon and Richard Lochhead MSP.

The Statement deals with the proposed Commission plan to change various regulations in the CFP in order to turn the policy into a sustainable one.

Commissioner Damanaki spoke about the Commission's proposed framework for setting catch levels for 2012 and beyond via the total allowable catch (TAC) and quota regulation (TQR). Against a backdrop of the poor state of many EU fish stocks and the continued issue of overfishing, the Commission announced its aim to ensure that all fish stocks should be fished within the threshold of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) by 2015 and where there was insufficient scientific advice or data the precautionary approach should be adopted and a cut of 25 per cent should be applied to the TAC. Commissioner Damanaki also explained that she intended to split the TQR into two parts this year in order to improve the process: internal stocks to be decided at the November council and external (those subject to international negotiations, principally joint EU-Norway stocks) in December.

There was near universal opposition to the idea of the 25 per cent cut for data-poor stocks with 19 of the 22 fishing member states (and Austria) explicitly opposing this. There was concern that this approach would merely increase levels of discarded fish in many cases and that a more targeted approach, using all available data or advice, even incomplete, would be preferable.

There was widespread concern among all fishing member states about aspects of the MSY principle. Nearly all noted that 2015 was the target for all fisheries and that this should be achieved on a gradual basis. The UK, along with Ireland, Spain, Belgium and coastal state in the Baltic expressed concern about how individual species MSY targets could be identified correctly in a multi-species environment.

The UK, Spain, Denmark, France, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal and Austria also expressed concern about the idea of splitting the TQR decision-making across two councils, creating administrative inefficiency.

As usual there are several various documents, all dry as dust and hard to digest but they are out. Here is the link. We shall be analyzing them and picking up other comments as time goes on.

... for the Commission's plan, it is interesting to find this on the BBC site

Maritime and Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki said that the EU had to admit that the policy so far had been a failure.

"There is overfishing; we have 75% overfishing of our stocks and comparing ourselves to other countries we cannot be happy," Ms Damanaki told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.

"So we have to change. Let me put it straight - we cannot afford business as usual any more because the stocks are really collapsing."