If a foreigner asked an Englishman to name his country’s national dish the chances are that he would answer “fish and chips”. Up until a few years ago that was almost certainly true but following the collapse of our fishing industry in the late 20thcentury our eating habits have changed. How can this have happened?
Well, by the late 1950s the British fishing industry was buoyant and fishing ports like Fleetwood, Hull and Grimsby were booming with the latter said to be the largest fishing port in the world landing greater quantities of haddock, plaice and halibut (to name but a few species) than anywhere else on the planet.
Now, however these once great ports are mere shadows of themselves and where once there would be hundreds of boats lined along the docks their place has been taken by pleasure craft and the odd inshore fishing vessel. Today the main business in many English fishing ports is the freezing and processing of fish caught by fishing fleets from other countries.
It’s hard to believe that this was allowed to happen and almost harder to believe how it happened. Over-fishing undoubtedly caused a reduction in fish stocks leading in turn to a drop in catches but that could have been dealt with by a system of fishing quotas, limiting the size of catches. The main reasons for the decline were the Government’s failure to back the fishing industry in the Cod Wars of the 1970s (a dispute over the size of the Icelandic fishing grounds) and then in the same decade, the surrender of British fishing rights in return for entry into the European Economic Community. Yes, in a clandestine deal the British Government gave away our exclusive right to fish our own waters to our new European partners. At a stroke the fishing industry was decimated leading to mass unemployment in British fishing ports and a severe restriction (authorised by the European Commission) in the size of British catches.
Matters were and continue to be made worse by the absurd European Union’s Common Fisheries policy, a policy that enforces rigid quotas but which at the same time forces fishermen to discard any fish not included in the quota for that particular fishing trip. This means that a boat authorised to land cod and haddock, for example, must throw away any other fish caught in their nets. Thus millions of tons of perfectly edible and valuable fish (already dead in the nets in most cases) are dumped at sea every year to rot at the bottom of the ocean. In a country where many fishermen are struggling to make a living and in a world where millions of people are dying of starvation it is an absolute disgrace and it almost defies belief that politicians can allow such a scandal to exist.
Of course we still enjoy our fish and chips in spite of the fact that a big increase in price, over the years, has been followed by a corresponding decrease in size. To the average Englishman the taste of cod or haddock and chips cooked in beef dripping is still a mouth-watering prospect but for many the bitter aftertaste of the betrayal of our fishing heritage is the taste that lingers the longest.
Common Sense 