The Background

In 1977 the United Kingdom, in concert with its EEC partners, responded to the Icelandic Government’s extension of its fisheries limits by declaring a 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone around the EEC. This had the effect of evicting from their traditional fishing grounds a group of Spanish flag fishing vessels which had, for a very long time, fished in what had been international waters off Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Cornwall.

Simultaneously the EEC instituted the Common Fisheries Policy (“CFP”) in an attempt to regulate the fishing effort of the member states by means of a quota system.

In the early days of the CFP, the quotas were purely notional and were intended to establish what the fishing fleets actually caught rather than what they ought to catch. Since these notional quotas were clearly going to determine the real quotas once the CFP was up and running, the game plan was to fish as much as possible to ensure that your fishing fleet got as big as possible a slice of the cake when quotas became restrictive rather than investigative.

It was perhaps for this reason that the Spaniards who were evicted from their traditional fishing grounds by the establishment of the 200 mile limit found no official opposition (i.e., Governmental opposition) when they began to re-register their Spanish flag vessels as British flag vessels. Equally there was no official opposition to the purchase by Spaniards of British flag vessels. These two groups of “British” vessels – the ex-Spanish and the now Spanish-owned – contributed healthily to the uptake of fish which subsequently transmuted into British quotas.

Whilst there was no official opposition there was increasing local opposition from fishermen. Curiously enough this initial local opposition concerned not the catching of fish because the “Spanish species” – Hake, Anglerfish (Monk) and Megrim – were of little interest either to the British fishermen or the British consumer – but the sale of its by-catch in British fish markets. The strategy of the Anglo-Spaniards, as they were called, was to land their principal catch – the Spanish species – into refrigerated lorries at ports in the West Country to be transported to the lucrative markets of Spain. The by-catch, however, which was of no interest to the Spanish consumer, would be sold on English fish markets thus depressing the price for those species – good for the British consumer: bad for the British fisherman. This local opposition was appeased by a statute called the British fishing Boats Act 1983, a clever piece of legislation which permitted the Anglo-Spaniards to continue fishing against the British quotas in Irish waters but prohibited them from landing their catch in the United Kingdom.

In practice the British Fishing Boats Act left everyone happy. The British Government was happy because the Anglo-Spaniards continued to build up the British track record of fish which would ultimately be turned into British quota. The British fisherman was happy because their prices were not depressed by an increased supply of fish from external sources. And the Anglo-Spaniards were happy because they could continue to fish and, quite frankly, it was easier to take the catch back to Spain on board the vessels than to tranship it into lorries at a British port. Even if the Anglo-Spaniards had not been happy, there was nothing they could do about it because Spain was not yet a member of the EEC.

When in [1985] Spain joined the EEC the situation changed entirely for the following reasons:

  1. The British Fishing Boats Act (which was aimed at non-EEC boats) ceased to have any effect in relation to Spanish owned boats which, overnight, had become EEC boats.
  2. The development of the CFP meant that quotas for traditional UK fish species were becoming restrictive and nobody believed that this situation was going to improve in the long run. British fishermen were looking for new catching possibilities and so the Spanish species (Hake, Monk and Megrim) suddenly became interesting to them. The British consumer was still uninterested in them but surely the inevitable dismantling of Spanish import taxes would open up the Spanish market to fish caught by British owned boats?
  3. The Spanish owners suddenly acquired legal rights in the event that the British authorities overstepped the mark.
The stage was now set for confrontation. From the political point of view the following aspects played an important part in the deliberations of the British Government:

  1. The growing groundswell of resentment against the Anglo-Spaniards was concentrated in the West Country fishing ports, particularly Plymouth, Brixham and Newlyn. These were areas in which the Conservative Party felt vulnerable to a swing to the Liberals and an election was approaching.
  2. There was a strong feeling in the country – a feeling shared and colourfully articulated by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher – that the United Kingdom was losing sovereignty to Brussels and fishing seemed to represent a good and easily understood example of this problem and an area where a stand should be made.
  3. It was genuinely believed in both bureaucratic and political circles that the CFP represented a derogation from many of the principles on which the EEC was based. It is difficult to reconcile what appears to be the rationale of the CFP, i.e., UK quotas for UK fishermen, with principles such as freedom of establishment, free access to raw materials, no discrimination on grounds of nationality etc unless it was intended to be a derogation.

The result was a political decision to make life impossible for the Anglo-Spaniards. This was done first by altering the conditions attaching to fishing licences. After the ECJ declared these initial attempts to be unlawful (see the cases of “Agegate” and “Jaderow”), the UK Government opted for a full frontal approach and unveiled the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 which sought to go to the root of the problem by reserving the right to own a British fishing boat (and thereby the right to fish for British quotas) to British nationals who were resident and domiciled in the United Kingdom.

N.B. Agegate and Jaderow

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