Will fishing get sold down the line again?
Last time it was sheep, this time it could be the Financial Services sector - worth £180 billion.
On February 28th, MPs in Westminster Hall (all 25 of them) debated the UK Fishery Policy in the light of Brexit and our withdrawal from the EU and, in time, the CFP. Above is the Hansard transcript of the debate.
Con MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, if nothing else a consummate politician, mentioned fishing on this week's a Week in Westminster on BBC R4 - he knows that it is a totemic issue for the public as it is so closely associated with the Brexiteer's mantra, "take back control' which became a byline during and after the referendum back in 2016. Even though, at times, having triggered Article 50 it seems we have actually ceded control to the other 27 EU states across the Channel.
By way of interest:
Records of parliamentary debate go back to 1803, however, the Hansard of today, a comprehensive account of every speech, began in 1909 when Parliament took over the publication and established its own staff of official Hansard reporters. At the same time the decision was made to publish debates of the two houses in separate volumes, and to change the front cover from orange-red to light blue. A larger page format was introduced with new technology in 1980.
Hansard is not a word-for-word transcript of debates in Parliament. Its terms of reference are those set by a House of Commons Select Committee in 1893, as being a report
...which, though not strictly verbatim, is substantially the verbatim report with repetitions and redundancies omitted and with obvious mistakes (including grammatical mistakes) corrected, but which, on the other hand, leaves out nothing that adds to the meaning of the speech or illustrates the argument.[6]
