Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset has warmly backed former Minister Owen Patterson’s claim that “Theresa May’s Chequer’s plan will prove fatal to British fishing”.

In a strongly worded article, Mr Patterson, who served as DEFRA Secretary of State from 2012-2014, and as shadow fisheries Minister before that, describes the decline of British fishing as “the worst, most destructive consequence of our EU membership.”

Saying that the Common Fisheries Policy is a disaster which, over 45 years, has halved our total catch and reduced our fishermen to 12,000, Mr Patterson writes, “it is vital that we use Brexit to free ourselves completely from its grasp.”

An alternative to the CFP’s controversial ‘fixed quotas’ and ‘discard bans,’ which are estimated to waste a million tons of fish a year, would allow fishermen to land mixed catches typical of our waters, Mr Patterson says. He adds that fishermen could “keep, land and record all catches in exchange for a limit on fishing time at sea”

Mr Patterson warns that the Government must act quickly. “Yet the disastrous Chequers White Paper advocates a lengthy transition phase under European rules which would prove fatal.”

The transition phase would mean that the UK must obey all incoming EU laws, including the 2019 discard ban, says Mr Patterson. This, in turn, reduces the amount British fishermen can legally catch.

The EU would then have “every incentive to enforce this ban as international law says if a nation does not have the capacity to catch all its resources it must give the surplus to its neighbours,” says Patterson.

“This is very far from the promise that post Brexit, the UK will be an independent coastal state, able to control access to our waters,” says Drax. “Fishermen in South Dorset and across the country backed leaving the EU on the understanding that their livelihoods would be restored.”

“Once we were a net exporter of fish; now we are running an annual trade deficit close to a quarter of a million tons.”

“I am grateful to Mr Patterson for pointing out the yawning chasm between what Brexit promised and what the Government, with its Chequers’ deal, is now trying to push on us.”

“We have everything to fight for and I shall oppose this plan on behalf of Dorset’s fishermen.”