The EP will vote on 22 October on the subsidies package of the CFP.
Here it looks like things will go back in time, rather than forward.
The strange thing is that it looks like vessel construction subsidies (which I think should be called taxpayers handouts) will be re-introduced. Scrapping will be preserved.
This is strange for an industry that often claims to embrace the ideals of the free market. MEPs were intensely lobbied by the fishermen representatives to re-introduce tax payers funding for boat building.
Spanish MEPs opened up an amendment designed to help small fishermen build boats to a corporate welfare party that will allow fishermen to have their co-financed by european taxpayers’ money.
It is hard to find any public reference to the industry opposing these 1970s subsides.
The only example I could find was swedish fishermen called for end for subsidies for boat building and scrapping during the consultation to the green paper.
Surely an industry who has many individualists on board can not all have embraced the values of 1970s socialist economic dependency.
As one fishermen who I admire put it “the day you become existent on the government for the cheque in the post, is the day you have stopped becoming a fisherman”.
Surely that day has come?