European Union Bill

The noble Lord really must not say that. It is not true. Most of our fishing grounds have always been shared with our neighbours—the French, the Belgians and the Germans—and we have always had to come to terms with them. All that the European common fisheries policy does is to have a sensible mechanism. It is not that the policy being common is wrong but that the policy is wrong. You have to have a common policy; otherwise you can only make these decisions with the marlinspike. It is just not true that we had 75 per cent of it before.