Monday 1 March 2021

MP for Grimsby confident fishing problems will be 'overcome'

Lia Nici is the Conservative MP for Great Grimsby, and has been an MP since 12 December 2019.  She came in on the coat tails of Boris Johnson and has a seat in what is perhaps the most important town in Britain as far as the fishing industry is concerned. It is synonymous with fish isn't it?  She is obviously keen to retain the seat next time but that might prove a tad difficult given what her government - or more properly Johnson, Gove and Frost, have done to the industry on which many of her constituents rely.

Last week she tweeted:

One begins to see how con men and scam artists manage to repeatedly fool the mark.  You could present solid evidence using a sledgehammer that they are being conned yet they still prefer the comforting lie to the painful truth.  Johnson is the main cause of the present crisis in the fishing business.

Brexit has been so good for fishermen the government has had to step in with a £23 million fund to tide them over (no pun intended). Nice though it is, it is not how things are supposed to work. Governments usually take money rather than hand it out - especially Conservative ones.

Replies to her tweet do not seem to share her optimism and it isn't clear how many on the zoom call were 'confident the problems would be 'overcome.'  Many appeared to be a tad sceptical.

It was like passengers from the Titanic, aboard a lifeboat bobbing up and down in the dark in the North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15th 1912 were being told not to worry because Captain Smith would soon get the great liner back up and all would be well.

The barriers that the TCA creates are permanent and are not likely to be removed unless we agree to align with EU SPS rules (anathema to Lord Frost) or rejoin the EEA (anathema to the entire Tory party) and it's not easy to see why the EU would sit down anytime soon to renegotiate sections of a deal that has only just been signed.

By the time anything significant is going to change many fishermen will be out of business.

The fishing agreement is due for renewal in 2026 and Johnson has 'assured' people that would be the moment when Britain would exercise its right to 'take back control' of our entire coastal waters. I do not know if that is what he told his zoom audience but I assume it was in there somewhere.

Unfortunately, not all fishermen will be aware that on the very same day in 2026, the energy agreement between the EU and the UK also comes up for renewal. Lia Nici will know this I'm sure.

Well, anybody who thought that 2026 offered any hope would do well to look at how much we rely on imported energy. Food may be a big problem but we can probably source most things from elsewhere in the world given a bit of time. Energy is a bit different.  We only have undersea connectors with the EU and running cables to the Pacific is technically impossible. The transmission losses would be phenomenal.

This very morning at 3 am we were importing 19% of our energy from the EU, as this tweet makes clear:

By 7 am it had dropped back a bit to a more normal 8%:

These are extraordinary figures and show how reliant we are on the EU. Does anyone seriously think we are going to be self sufficient in energy by 2026 and if we are not, is the government going to opt to provide more opportunities for fishermen at the expense of rolling black outs for the country?

If I was a fishermen I would start thinking hard about a change in career.  And the same if I was Lia Nici, (maj: 7,331). Martin Vickers, Tory MP for Cleethorpes (maj 21,418) might not be entirely safe either.

Finally, I don't know if I'm misreading the situation but I get the impression that Richard North is now defending the EU against all comers.  This morning the plight of flower growers is highlighted and he takes his lead from an article in the Mail on Sunday attacking the EU.

Dr North is having none of it and blames it all on Johnson:

"Clearly, the rush to get a deal left little time for such considerations – another aspect of Boris's botched Brexit, that is so damaging British business. But such is that "take" from the MoS that "Boris" gets a free pass. This is a "spiteful" action by a "petty and vindictive" EU, the only Tory-approved way that Brexit can be reported."

I wonder if in the North household they are starting to have second thoughts about it all?

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