Crime on the high seas - committed for decades by the EU's Common Fisheries Policy - Telegraph

When I heard the BBC’s Today programme banging on last week about the need to end the scandal of “discarding” – the practice whereby fishermen are forced to chuck millions of dead fish back into the sea – I could only give a weary shrug.

Year after year in the 1990s I exposed the horror story of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), based on an utterly cynical (and illegal) trick whereby, in 1971, it was made a condition of Britain’s entry into the Common Market that we should hand over the richest fishing waters in the world as a “common European resource”. No aspect of the CFP was more criminal than what I first described in 1993 as an “ecological catastrophe” – the pointless destruction, every year, of fish in their “billions” (as an internal European Commission document admitted in 1991).