![beach alamy stock photo beach alamy stock photo](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/KPCDH2/little-girl-on-the-beach-KPCDH2.jpg)
“Something like 78 percent of fishing boats are under 10 meters in the United Kingdom, and they’re mostly fishing in that inshore zone,” says Stewart. The UK government also went back on a promise made by Victoria Prentis, the UK minister in charge of fisheries, that EU fishermen would be excluded from a six-to-12-nautical-mile (11-to-22-kilometer) zone from the British coast. This version of the agreement will stand until it comes up for renegotiation in 2026. Instead, the European Union succeeded in largely preserving the status quo for its fishermen by tying the future of fishing to the passage of an overall deal on trade. In its negotiations with the European Union, the newly autonomous UK government argued that fisheries quotas should be allocated based on where the fish actually live, a principle known as zonal attachment that would have decisively favored British fishermen. (The UK government did not respond to requests for comment.)Ī realpolitik mindset by the European Union is to blame, says Bryce Stewart, the study’s lead author and a fisheries biologist at the University of York in England. In a new study, scientists have analyzed the vast disparity between the pro-leave campaign’s rhetoric and the post-Brexit reality to show how leaving the European Union has had little or no benefit at all for British fishing communities. The deal was excoriated by British fishing organizations. Rather than leading to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extra catch for British fishermen, as promised by UK prime minister Boris Johnson, the agreement largely preserved continental fishermen’s access to the United Kingdom’s exclusive economic zone. The fisheries deal that was actually struck between the United Kingdom and the European Union in January 2021, however, fell far from that vision of UK waters being preserved for UK fishermen.
![beach alamy stock photo beach alamy stock photo](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BXFWA0/mixed-race-girl-on-beach-BXFWA0.jpg)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, an estimated 92 percent of the UK fishing community intended to vote for Brexit in 2016. They promised that, post-Brexit, UK fishermen would have unfettered access to domestic waters. Politicians pushing for the country to leave the European Union capitalized on the widespread perception that EU regulators favored fishermen from the continent over those from the United Kingdom when allocating fishing quotas. Authored byĪp| 700 words, about 3 minutes Share this articleįew communities in the United Kingdom were as supportive of Brexit as fishermen. Photo by Carolyn Clarke/Alamy Stock Photo British Fishermen Feared Pro-Brexit Campaigners Would Betray Them-and They Did Fishermen overwhelmingly supported Brexit, and it came back to bite them. There was a vast disparity between the promises made by the pro-leave campaign to British fishermen and the fisheries deal that was ultimately struck.