To The Daily Telegraph
For the past five years I have focused my recreational fishing on the pursuit of sea bass in Britain’s coastal waters. I have caught a few, but only one of legal size for me to take home for my supper. The rest have all been returned to the water to grow bigger.
The EU has now banned recreational fishermen from such activity, as we are apparently endangering stock levels. I can be fined up to £50,000 if I am caught with a bass. However, commercial trawlers can take up to 1.3 tons of the legal size of bass per month. I am no longer undecided about the In/Out referendum.
Alan Belk, Leatherhead, Surrey

The question to be asked is, “Is the writer correct?”

The ban is on sea bass sea bass fishing for six months (only) from January to help halt a “dramatic decline” in stocks. A statement on proposed EU fishing quotas said that sea bass was a “special case”, and extra measures were needed to “halt the dramatic decline in this important stock”. For the second half of the year a one tonne catch limit for boats and a one fish bag limit for recreational anglers was recommended. The commission also proposes to maintain the closure for commercial fishing around Ireland.

There are 80 commercial boats who fish for sea bass in continental waters and they are being banned as well as the amateurs. It clearly affects the livelihoods of a number of, mostly Welsh, fishermen, there is no doubt about that. But the point is that anti-EU sentiment is fuelled by lies and disinformation. My own company, as pointed out previously, was affected by a ban that turned out to have originated from the bloated British health and safety industry, and had nothing to do with the EU. But the EU was conveniently blamed.

I suspect that the letter writer has likewise discovered a convenient stick with which to beat the EU, and has misrepresented what the rule actually says. This is very common indeed. The fact is that the European waters are being fished out and the EU is right to restrict fishing if there is to any vestige of a future fishing industry. It is people like the letter-writer who will take Britain out of the EU, often for petty and bogus reasons. Who will they blame when living standards fall in the UK and the country ends up with a level of influence not seen in Europe since the the 15th Century?*

* For the non-historians I refer to the period of the Wars of the Roses, when England was of no account, indeed, a laughing stock, to continental powers.