Joe Robertson

I could speak about so many aspects of the Brexit renegotiation that the Government are entering into—Conservative Members in particular have spoken a lot about those issues—but I wish to focus on fishing and farming. It is always a worry when this Government go into bat in a negotiation, because when Labour negotiates, Britain invariably loses. The current agreement with the EU on fisheries should be a baseline, and preferably a springboard, so that if the Government negotiate, they improve on that deal. That was always the intention. What is a negotiation if we go into it with a mind to sell out and come away with a worse deal? That is what is on the mind of UK fishing communities right now. When my hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth) asked the Prime Minister only last week to rule out giving away sovereign British waters to the EU, he refused to do so. The Minister may intervene on me to give our fishing communities the reassurance that the Government will not sell out to the EU on our sovereign waters. We know what the French want: to send their trawlers closer inshore to our fishing waters in order to catch fish from UK waters and take them back to the EU and sell them. We are already in a situation whereby Dutch trawlers—4,000 tonne vessels—travel up and down the English channel trawling the bottom of the ocean. They take a huge bycatch of fish, including bass, right in front of small British vessels—such as those fishing out of the Isle of Wight, where my constituency is—that have a set of rules restricting their bass catch. They have to watch the Dutch boats scrape those fish up by accident and take them home. If the Government enter a negotiation, the current arrangement for fishermen must be a baseline. They must improve on the deal and absolutely rule out any concessions to the French and the EU on sovereignty over British territorial waters.