European Union Bill

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, as usual. The key is the ability of a nation to control its own waters up to the 200-nautical-mile limit, which it would have been sensible to retain, and which we could have retained had we negotiated harder in 1972, but we did not. Only a nation can conserve its own national resource—what is handed on to the next generations of fishermen. The Heath Government made a tragic decision from the point of view of the fishing industry. I want to reverse that, and we should work to do so. I still want to pull out of the common fisheries policy. Perhaps it would require a few gunboats around the coast to establish that.