It always amazes me when brexit shouters have a go at the EU for their common agricultural and fishing policies. Don’t they realise Britain is a ‘Services Economy’ ? Don’t they realise successive UK governments have steered not only the UK economy that way, but that they also actively pursued the interests of the City of London in the EU corridors of power, at the detriment of UK Manufacturing, Agriculture and Fisheries?
I remember clearly reading in a Sunday Newspaper that a lot of the agricultural subsidies in the UK ended up in the wrong hands, because the British delegation in Brussels insisted that Agricultural Subsidies had to be dished out as ‘rights’ so that they could be sold independent of the land they were originally dished out for. This would give UK land owners a little nest egg on retirement and the City another commodity to trade in. The Guardian called it “a blatant transfer of cash to the rich“.
The scandal reported by the Sunday papers that millions of EU subsidies changed hands in this way and ended up filling the pockets of rich City folk and newspaper proprietors with large hunting estates instead of supporting marginal farmers on arable and grazing land.
Click this link to Google how easy it is to find confirmation of this
A similar think I recall happening when the EU common fisheries policy was reformed to support conservation of fish stocks in the EU. British fleet owners found it harder and harder to make a profit with high UK wages on the one hand and dwindling fish stocks on the other. So again they made sure the Brussels lobby made fishing quotas something you could sell separate from the original UK boats they were assigned to and rich UK fleet owners were quick to offload them to either Spanish boats where the crew were on lower wages or the more efficient high tech boats the Dutch started using when fishing became tough.
Here is a screen shot of a simple Google search using the words “uk fleet owners sold fishing quotas“. Why don’t you try how easy it is? Why do so many Brits prefer to believe the words of a Charlatan like Nigel Farage who reputedly only attended one of 36 EU fisheries committee meetings, where he was supposed to represent British interests?