Fight over Fishing Rights

Why are the UK and France enmeshed in an impassioned dispute over fishing?

• The fishing industry accounts for a very small portion of the economic output of both the UK and France.
• But from the heated, Brexit-related dispute that has emerged between the two countries over fishing rights in the English Channel, you’d think much more were at stake.
• Last week, France seized a British scallop dredger and continues to hold the ship and its crew in port.
• It’s all part of the dispute over how much access French boats should have to fish in UK waters post Brexit.
• The dispute deepened last week when a letter from the French prime minister surfaced in which he asked EU officials to show there was "more damage to leaving the EU than remaining there."
• In the United Kingdom, that statement was seen as a French request for the EU to punish Britons for Brexit.
• The fishing dispute is just another of many rifts between the two countries of late, bringing Franco-British relations to their lowest point in recent history.