UK Government slammed for treating Scottish fishing crisis 'like croquet'

In the past fortnight, the country’s iconic fishing industry has entered an unprecedented storm as Brexit red tape prevents fresh produce valued in European markets from crossing the Channel.

Around one third of the fleet is tied up at harbour as custom is cut off, and loads of langoustines that were bound for traders in France and Spain have had to be dumped. Logistics firms are caught too in a roadblock thrown up by the terms of the UK’s EU withdrawal deal, enacted suddenly after a last-minute agreement was reached while the UK Fisheries Minister was organising a village nativity trail.

The Scottish Fishing Federation has accused the Prime Minister of having “spun a line” about Brexit’s benefits as vessels still at sea sail for processing plants at Denmark instead of Scotland and crews call for urgent support to save their businesses.

READ MORE: UK Government refuses to publish calculated cost of Brexit on fish industry

That extra 48-hour journey is being made as domestic prices collapse by up to 80% and concerns grow about the long term impact on processing firms and more.

But while all this is going on, Scotland’s Rural Economy Secretary says a relaxed “air of unreality” has remained over Michael Gove’s XO Committee, which was set up to get the UK ready for Brexit.

“It’s as if they are discussing the rules of croquet, not a crisis which is in danger of bringing down businesses,” Ewing says.

“Much of the meetings are taken up with long presentations about how well everyone is doing.”

Ewing’s team, he says, is “wall-to-wall every day” meeting with seafood businesses, meat wholesalers and officials.

“We have had some quite big challenges to face with Covid and tourism and there was the farm payments problem in 2016, which we resolved, but for serious loss on a massive scale to the business sector, there’s been nothing like this in my five years as Rural Secretary.

“Some of stories are heartbreaking. They’re harrowing to hear.”

Ewing hasn’t hidden his criticism of the UK Government’s handling of Brexit, warning repeatedly of the damage he saw coming. In a strongly-worded letter to UK Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary George Eustice earlier this week, he said the “catastrophic impact on Scotland’s food and drink export industry” is playing out “as I had feared and predicted” and urged him to “understand some of the impacts”.

And in a ministerial statement on Thursday, he said “December 24, 2020 will be remembered as the day that the United Kingdom Government sold out Scottish fishing interests in the most egregious way”, with a deal that requires a reduction in stocks landed.

Warning that “we face a bleak future”, he warned his MSP colleagues it is “left to us” to “play the appalling hand” the Tories have dealt and insisting that “any attempt by the UK Government to correct its own failings through the upcoming bilateral negotiations at Scotland’s expense will be resisted utterly and publicised relentlessly”.

Adverse publicity, Ewing says, is what our ex-journalist Prime Minister fears the most – not crippling coastal economies. “When reasoned argument doesn’t work, press publicity is the play,” he says.

“He doesn’t like being hammered in the press.”

The Conservative Government, Ewing is convinced, “doesn’t really care about the operation of the fishing sector anyway”.

And he’s struck by the way the Scottish Tories have responded to the situation, trying to pin the blame for problems with new paperwork requirements on the Scottish Government and Food Standards Scotland. That, Ewing says, is “playing a blinder” with webinars and other resources to try to help companies manage forms that come with 60 pages of guidance.

Meanwhile, he’s hearing about “toe curling” problems like HMRC systems that don’t recognise monkfish tails as a type of fish and papers pushed back because they haven’t been written out in red ink.

“They tried to say the problem was there wasn’t enough environmental health officers,” he says of the Scottish Conservatives. “That’s just not true. You can have one thousand more environmental health officers, the problem is an untried and untested system was foisted on a sector without a chance to try it out.”

Ewing wants two main things from the UK Government – a derogation period to ease customs requirements until systems can manage and compensation for businesses affected.

READ MORE: How the fishing industry was pushed into Brexit's troubled waters

In Troon, SB Fish has put boats up for sale. In Tarbert, Loch Fyne Langoustines is facing bankruptcy.

Ewing is pleased that Johnson this week indicated he will pay out to affected firms – he’d called for it directly in an XO Committee meeting the day before. “I went in to provide a jolt of reality and try to get them to focus,” he says.”We have got a crisis unfolding on our doorstep.

“I told them ‘it’s time to take off the rose-tinted glasses you’re wearing and send them back to Specsavers’.”

But when Johnson’s House of Commons comment came, Ewing didn’t know it was coming. It was “off-the-cuff”, Ewing says. But he goes on: “If we play our cards right, we can force Westminster to do things.

“If there are two or three problems, one can sort them out. If there are 57 different varieties of problems at so many different levels, but most at a Westminster level, then it’s extremely difficult for me to have confidence that this can be sorted out in a short period of time but we are working flat out to do that.”