"SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH"

Splitting the kipper

by Duns Scotus 

It looks like Britain's membership of the EU was mainly about the fish. 

When British voters chose to join Europe in 1975 they were largely swayed by memes of cheap booze and cigarettes, combined with ABBA-fueled fantasies of sexual trysts with Swedish au pairs (British women, no doubt, had their own Mills-&-Boon-fuelled fantasies of "Latin lovers"). 

In other words, most people voted to join the EU (called the European Economic Community at that time) for spurious, LARPy, and not altogether wholesome reasons.

This self-deception went all the way up to the top of society, with those elites pushing the new European vision being just as deluded as those lower down the propaganda/gaslighting food chain who were falling for it. 

It was only a few groups of the organised working class who saw through the whole thing, in particular Britain's gnarled and leathery fishermen, who realised what Britain's membership of the EU was really all about, namely, handing over the fish.

This is why the only two areas that voted against joining Europe were those where fishermen and their families were a major part of the population:

Another factor less mentioned was the naive notion that Europe was actually "Whiter" than Britain, which, by the 1970s, had woken up to the fact that it had allowed itself to become a society characterized by racial replacement and racial tension. For reference, Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech was in 1968.

Under growing pressure from the voters, Britain's small but noisy nationalist fringe, and the occasional decent politician from the Labour and Tory parties, 1962 and 1968 saw major Immigration bills passed that attempted to restrict and regulate the inflow of immigrants. However, the other side of this were the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1976, both of which tried to "manage" the multicultural mess and social polarisation that had been imported into Britain by attacking the in-group preference and free speech of the indigenous people. 

Britain applying (1970), joining (1973) and then voting to remain in the EU (1975) fits nicely into this cluster of race-related legislation. 

But really, at the end of the day, it was mainly about the fish, as we saw in the final days of the exit negotiations, when the main sticking point was how to end the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).

According to this part of Britain's Faustian pact with the Continent, all EU fishing fleets had equal access to each other's waters. Due to Britain's extensive maritime zone and its particularly fishy waters, the CFP was a bonanza for French and the other EU fleets.

Under the CFP, the UK fishing fleet had the right to catch just under a half of the annual fishing quota in its own waters. EU fleets had access to about a third of the catch and the remainder was in the hands of boats from Norway and the Faeroe Islands (neither of which are in the EU). The Danish, Dutch and French fishing fleets are particularly dependent on fish caught in UK waters, with each of them catching more than 100,000 tonnes in the UK's waters every year.

Under the new treaty, 15% of the EU's fishing rights will revert to the UK immediately, with a further 2.5 percentage points every year until 2026. It's estimated that UK boats will have access to an extra £145 million of fishing quota every year. In 2019, British vessels caught 502,000 tonnes of fish, worth around £850 million, inside UK waters.

You may well ask why isn't all of the fishing coming back to the UK? Quite simply because most fish caught in UK waters ends up in Europe anyway, and if Britain was to insist on a fishing quota of 100%, the EU could retaliate by placing tariffs on British fish products, hurting the industry.

But it wasn't all about the fish. Geopolitics played a small part too. 

Back in the early 1970s, when Britain was pushing to join, fish was the main inducement to get the French to reverse their opposition, but this opposition was based on former President de Gaulle's belief that the British would act as a Trojan Horse for American interests in the EU.

As French Prime Minister Edith Cresson told the BBC:

"It was his personal decision. He had a lot of experience of the British and he always thought that they'd be on the Americans' side… so I don't think he believed that they'd play the game of Europe. Formally they'd be in, but actually they'd always be with the Americans."

In fact the desire to prove to Europe that Britain wouldn't be America's stooge was a big factor in the British government's refusal to join America in its war in Vietnam. As is well known, Britain has signed up for practically ever other US conflict, from Korea to Afghanistan. But during the period of greatest Gaullist influence, the UK basically snubbed its "special relationship" with America to create a "special relationship" with Europe. 

Now that is gone, and Europe is in the position of saying, "So long and thanks for all the fish."