There are few sadder symbols of post-Brexit Britain, or of its deliberate assault upon nature, than the national dish, fish and chips, and the fate of one of its principal ingredients, the cod. Cod are tasty creatures but they are severely overfished in UK waters, a fact masked by plentiful supplies reaching fish and chip shops until recently from Iceland, Norway, and – ah yes – Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given us one of two reasons why we urgently need to save our favourite fish from 40 years of mismanagement. The first is to protect our own future food security. Just when the price of cod and other materials has rocketed, leading our fish and chip shops to call for more cod from our own waters, stocks are around their worst levels on record. These national assets – which, under British law, belong to the king on behalf of the people – have declined precipitously in the past four decades.
Through the lens of the cost of living crisis, what has gone on looks like a flagrant sellout of the public interest. Take the west of Scotland cod, one of five breeding populations in UK waters and the one that has suffered the worst declines. Catch limits for the west of Scotland cod have been set above scientific advice, ludicrously, every year for the past 35 years. Inevitably, the west of Scotland cod has declined by 92% since 1981.
Trawl fishers in the west of Scotland prefer to catch langoustines, which are more valuable than cod and present all the year round. But the huge bycatch of juvenile white fish, such as cod, means these species never recover. The Scottish parliament’s rural affairs committee heard recently that there could be about 3.5m baby cod in the Firth of Clyde and yet 2m of them are being killed every year by langoustine trawlers as bycatch.
With the right management – more creeling or potting for scampi, for instance, and an inshore prohibition on trawling – cod could be nursed back to profusion. Is that not where the public interest lies? Instead, the tendency of politicians and officials has been to defer to the most damaging and heavily indebted fleets, in defiance of scientific rationality or wise stewardship of a national asset.
This perverse behaviour is not exclusive to Scotland. In the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea, fishing for other species continues apace, though scientists advise a zero catch of cod, which is not enforced. In the North Sea, where there was a recovery plan for the cod a decade ago, stocks actually began to recover. Then politicians and officials gave in and set catch limits at levels that made recovery impossible.
The travesty of setting quotas above scientific advice was supposed to have been stopped by the post-Brexit Fisheries Act. It was said this was going to deliver a “gold standard” of sustainable fisheries and make Britain a “world leader” in protecting the sea. The result has been rather different. Last December ministers and officials signed an agreement with the EU that allowed 65% of all catch limits to be set above scientific advice. Even allowing for a degree of chaos as the EU started working with Britain as an independent coastal state, that is a total disgrace.
Which brings us to the second reason why it is time to bring back British cod: because we can. Brexit creates an opportunity to do our seas and our fishers a favour by managing fish stocks for recovery. We need to make our Fisheries Act work, or politicians and officials will go on managing our fish stocks and our seas as badly as they did before.
To that end, a group of us – including Blue Marine Foundation, the charity I work for; the National Federation of Fish Friers; the Angling Trust; and Our Seas, a Scottish coalition of 100 fishing and environmental groups – are asking people to sign a parliamentary petition calling on the government to negotiate with the EU sustainable catch limits for all five populations of cod in UK waters this year. We need 10,000 signatures for the government to respond and 100,000 to trigger a debate in the House of Commons.
The proposition is uncontroversial: it simply asks the government to do what it always claims to do, but never actually does – manage fish stocks sustainably so they can rebuild. It effectively says that after two decades in which public consciousness about the state of our seas has been raised by television programmes such as The Blue Planet, The End of the Line and Hugh’s Fish Fight, we expect better.
We wait to hear whether the environment secretary Thérèse Coffey’s team will scrap the “attack on nature” in Liz Truss’s growth plan – the insane repeal of 570 hard-fought-for pieces of environmental legislation. I hope they will. What is certain is that the attack on nature represented by the annual setting of fisheries catch limits is about to begin.
Only, this time things may be different. The EU is coming under pressure in the European court to obey its own, unheeded law that says it should have banned overfishing by 2020. Meanwhile, lawyers are looking at the many pieces of UK legislation that say fish catches should be set at levels that enable fish such as cod to recover. If catch limits are set far above scientific advice again this December, I have a new year’s prediction: the UK government could be in court, charged with squandering the king’s fish.
Charles Clover is executive director of the Blue Marine Foundation and author of Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans
