EU helps Spanish plunderers put our fishermen on dole

THE SUN, photo Emma Bonino (Hard of herring... Emma Bonino on trip to Cornwall)

By TERESA GORMAN, Tory MP for Billericay

EMMA Bonino, the European Fisheries Commissioner, makes my blood boil.

Every time I hear her I want to give her a slap round the eer with a wet herring.

But that's now almost impossible because there are no herring left in our waters.

Because everyone has the rlght to fish in the seas around Britain the stocks have beenexhausted.

Now, to suggest that our fishermen must cut their fleet even further only adds insult to their injury. Tragically it is no good complaining because there is no redress for us as members of the European Community.

We have the good fortune to have the most productive fishing waters in the North Atlantic.

Places like the Dogger Bank provide us with some of the best spawning grounds around our coast and that is why the Spanish want to come in with their massive trawlers paid for out of EU subsidies.

They may be the best fishing waters but they are being wiped out by a predatory fishing nation before they have a chance to grow to maturity.

Emma Bonino might just as well say she is going to put the whole of our fishing industry out of business and tell our trawlermen to burn their boats and get out of the trade.

NOTHING

But there is nothing else left for them to do.

In Italy, Portugal, Greece or Spain they could possibly turn to tourism but we don't have the weather for that.

We may be a smail Island but we have a huge coastline, with fishing communities dotted all along it.

There is nothing else for these people to do to earn a living. The Spanish are not alone as the pirates of the North Atlantic.

The French take 70 per cent of the cod around our south west coast.

That's because they have taken up the quotas of countries like Belgium and Luxembourg which are scarcely renowned for their fishing fleets.

But it is the Spanish armada which is cousing Ihe biggest problem.

Herring was once the most common and cheap fish available. Today it has become

luxury.

It's not because our fleets are over-fishing but because they are expected to throw hall of it back into the sea.

Meanwhile the Spanish fleets are allowed to roam far outside their own territorial waters where the fishing is so inferior. They go down as far as Namibia on the south west coast of Africa where the waters are so productive.

Now they've been chased out of that area and they have been chased out of Canada. So they are looking for alternative fishing grounds.

Now they are trawling in the breeding grounds it means curtains for the remainder of ourstocks.

HELPLESS

Our problem is that we are helplees and unable to defend the industry.

We have signed up to the Common Fisheries Policy and under the Treaty we cannot withdraw.

We could iry and estabIish a 200-mile exclusion zone around our coastline but we would need gun-boats to police it.

That would be intoIerable to the European Union.

We would be left with one last resort, to leave the European Union altogether.

That would suit me. I'm an Outer. I've always been an Outer.