The Guardian view on fishing and Brexit: still on the hook | Editorial
In British politics, the fishing industry carries an emotional resonance matched by few others; mining and shipbuilding are the only obvious contenders. Perhaps this is because Britain is an island. Perhaps it is because deep sea fishing was always prodigiously dangerous and heroic. Perhaps it is because fishing communities are particularly tightly knit. Or perhaps it is because, unlike mining and merchant shipbuilding, UK fishing continues to survive. Fishing is a relatively small industry, but it still sustains about 24,000 jobs, a third of them in fishing itself, double that in processing, and half of the total in Scotland, particularly in the north-east.
Whatever the reason, the fact of that resonance is beyond dispute, as the government has again discovered this week. Under pressure from north-east Scottish and south-west English fishing constituencies that voted Conservative, the UK has pressed to be unhooked from the EU's common fisheries policy as soon as Brexit officially occurs in March 2019. The EU, in contrast, argued that the CFP should continue through the transition period. At the start of March, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, said the government was open to continued inclusion. A week later, the environment secretary, Michael Gove, and the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson - a leaver and a remainer - teamed up to press the case for leaving the CFP during the transition. This week in Brussels, that aspiration was dashed when the transition terms kept Britain firmly within the CFP until December 2020.
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