May 14, 2021 - 10:30am
A ceasefire has been declared in the great Jersey-France whelk war of 2021.
Who has won and who has lost? Nobody so far — but the Jersey government was the first to blink.
The restrictions unilaterally imposed by the Jersey government on Norman and Breton boats have been withdrawn until 1 July. Talks with France and the EU will resume.
The dispute was front-page news in all UK newspapers and the top of radio and TV bulletins last Thursday and Friday. Very little has been reported on the truce.
The last we heard from the UK tabloids was that the Royal Navy (two small patrol boats) had put to flight an invasion fleet of 100 French fishing boats which protested in St Helier harbour last Thursday. The French said, au contraire, that they left when they intended to leave — to go fishing for whelks, scallops and lobsters.
The dispute, over how many French boats can fish within 6 to 12 miles of the Jersey coast post-Brexit, has yet to be resolved. The French government and the European Commission accuse Jersey of breaking the law by acting against the letter and spirit of the post-Brexit fishing deal struck on 24 December. This agreement allowed inshore access for mostly French boats which can prove they have fished in southern English and Channel Islands waters in recent years.
The Jersey government imposed limits which appeared to bear no relation to fishing records — restricting some French boats to a few hours a year. Jersey has now fallen in line with the less confrontational approach of the Guernsey government, which rolled over present rights to July while talks continued.
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SubscribeSending the patrol vessels in was simply the same as sending in police in riot gear to supervise a demonstration. They look dramatic but most of the time stand around making sure nothing gets out of hand. Just sitting back and picking their noses while a legion of hairy and angry French fishermen descend on Jersey’s port wasn’t an option. And isn’t fisheries supervision one of the Royal Navy’s oldest jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Patrol_Squadron)?
Calling the French threat to turn off the electricity “ill considered” while accusing the British government of “belligerent” behaviour: pull the other one, mate. No one’s buying that. A laughable use of the language.
Off course, when the great annual cross Channel folk migration, of Sinbad & Co, starts next week, the (Royal) Navy will, as always, be conspicuous by its absence.
That’s maybe because it’s not responsible for that. The UK Border Force is.
Well it should be,
For centuries that was its role.
Now it seems to be just swanning around the Far East, showing off the ridiculous H.M.S Gordon Brown.
Controlling migration can hardly have been the Royal Navy’s role for centuries when any generalised control on who enters the country is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Stopping invasion has always been in the navy’s remit.
Precisely, and with the notable exception of 1688 they have done rather well.
1066?
Migration is not invasion.
“Repelling boarders” then.
“An ill-considered threat by Paris to switch off the under-water cables from Normandy which supply 90% of Jersey’s electricity may have had some effect. It is doubtful, however, that France would have carried out the threat, which would also have blacked-out France-friendly Guernsey.”
That angered alot of people, but hey, who cares what the little people think, hmm?
I hope the government remembers that this was France’s response to a small economic dispute. The tabloids weren’t entirely wrong on this one.
Remainer trying to sound reasonable, but uncomfortable in defence of the UK and an apologist for an EU member state. Anything to do down the UK as a punishment for Brexit. Stuck record.
Not surprising really – he lives there
Tripe its not a punishment for Brexit. Its the fact that the UK has signed and ratified the WA and the TCA and is now reneging on them and openly admitting its doing so because it does not like what it signed and planned to renege all along.
How do you deal with lawless pariahs?
The real problem is that the Leave Campaign was based on a tissue of lies basically saying “we can have our cake and eat it because they need us more than we need them” – phrases actually uttered by Boris himself.
Take a read of the blog of pro-Brexit trade expert Dr Richard North who headed the Leave Alliance which was a co-founder of the Leave Campaign. I’m a Remainer but admire Dr North who had a plan (stay in the EEA first for a decade while making new trade deals) but very quickly he was excluded by Cummings, Farage, Banks and Johnson because Dr North is sane and would not agree to lies.
As he now writes, “Brexiters are discovering that you cannot legislate lies but like moths they will keep on smashing themselves against the onrushing windscreen of reality’.
Whist the EU ban on UK shellfish is in place it seems perfectly legitimate to maintain the most unaccommodating interpretations of any agreements just as they do.
As each day passes it seems as though Brexit was a lot better for the UK and a lot worse for the EU than was anticipated.
Tripe to put it mildly.
I was listening until the unsubstantiated slur about Brexit Jacobins.
do you actually know who the Jacobins were? Can you explain how a ‘leftist’ political faction in eighteenth century Paris relates to a elected British government in the 21st century? Seriously, it seems, well, an odd analogy.
As I understand it, the boats which were reduced to a few hours a year, could provide no records of their previous supposed fishing record.
This piece also fails to mention that many of these trawlers are scraping the bottom of the sea and destroying the entire marine ecosystem in order to catch the shellfish. This is insupportable and intolerable.
The devil is in the details, the majority of the French whelking boats are small boats and with single owner fishing families with generations of fishing.
These boats never had to have sat nav records of bigger boats and its these that are being demanded by Jersey authorities.
We should be paying those gallant French fisherman to intercept and arrest Sinbad & Co, as they commence their annual folk migration across the Channel.
I’m sure they would do a far better job than our frankly pathetic Border Force.
I was surprised that the French chose to invoke the comparison with the Battle of Trafalgar, given the outcome of that particular contest.
Perhaps they are as ignorant of their History as our leaders are of ours?
It reminds me of the Canadian-Danish issue over ownership of a tiny island near Greenland that blew up into a minor diplomatic spat and culminated in one side (can’t remember which) sending a navy ship to plant a flag there.
It resulted in nothing by the end, other than the best editorial cartoon ever. It was just after the US had a falling out with France over the Gulf War. France had refused to participate. Patriotic Americans changed the name of french fries to “Freedom Fries”. The cartoon I mentioned had a drawing of the bins at a Canadian donut shop (Tim Horton’s) with labels: Chocolate Glazed, Boston Cream, then Danish crossed out and “Freedom Donut” written in.
These idiotic ‘testosterone surges’ can have very serious consequences. 1914-18 for example.
How does this writer know that the French would not have carried out their threat to cut off the electricity. What is his source for this claim- or is it just wishful thinking?
I’m not inclined to de escalate this, but to be fair, I think the electricity threat was some hot air from a French MP rather than a stated government policy or threat.
Interesting that Boris’s CCJ made the first item on all news media, but the exposure that it was confected by an activist did not.
I have not seen any apology for the overreaction from any media outlet.
If the said activist has lied in his application to the court he has committed a VERY serious offence and hopefully will be severely dealt with. It is at least on a par with the offences of people like Aitkin and that Liberal chap who went to prison along with his wife when he tried to lie to the police about who was driving. To fabricate a debt in a malicious act against a politician is in my view far more serious than swapping points with your wife. Perverting the course of Justice has long sentences attached to it.
Its worth looking at the bigger picture.
At the start of the Brexit talks the UK, then represented by David Davis the first Brexit Sec, tried to make both the Withdrawal Agreement and any subsequent new trade deal a series of separate sectoral deals and incredibly even wanted bilateral deals between the UK and separate EU members.
The EU stood firm and said it has to be a single withdrawal deal with everything interdependent, and further that in a future new trade deal no sector would be siloed from the rest.
Johnson tried to go back to splitting into sectoral deals in the talks in the last months of 2020 and specifically wanted fishing left out of an UK-EU deal going back to the old divide and rule idea of the UK signing separate bilateral fishing deals with EU members. Again this was firmly rejected and it was at this time the French gave the example of in future linking fishing quotas to the rates charged to the UK for electricity supplied via the 2 gigawatt cross channel interconnecter which typically supplies 5% of UK power. Currently this is governed by a contract running until 2026 and the UK gets a very discounted EU members rate as do the CI and their contract also is due renegotiation in 2026.
So fishing is tied in with everything else and in the case of the Channel Islands as both UnHerd and the Observer have reported, there seems to be a very deliberate provocation by hardliners in the government of Jersey in conjunction with Brexit-Ultras in London and a brazen breach of the fishing agreement signed and ratified as part of the TCA.
So who are the hardliners in Jersey? Well a clue is the very public statement by France that its blocking the EU Commssion granting UK financial equivalence. Jersey is home for tax reasons to a number of multi-billion pound hedge funds and the assorted billionaires and multi-millionaires who own them and many of whom are big Brexit backers – people like the husband of Andrea Leadsom and her brother-in-law Peter du Putron who own Bell Rock Capital and who are domiciled in Jersey (for tax reasons) but who were big financial backers of the Leave Campaign.
Its a pattern now, Brexit-ultras are reneging on everything Johnson signed – the NIP, the March 16th tripartite fishing deal with the EU and Norway over North and Arctic Sea quota’s, and the whelking quota deal over the Channel Islands.