Christopher Booker with another report on the absurdities of the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy.

Owen Paterson MP, the Conservatives’ fisheries spokesman, last week pulled off a remarkable coup. In half a page of The Daily Telegraph and two pages of Fishing News, he exposed the ecological catastrophe of the EU’s common fisheries policy more vividly than any politician has done before.
Pictures showed a grim-faced Mr Paterson standing on the deck of a trawler in the Irish Sea, next to a net bulging with tiny plaice. Under EU rules, fishermen are forced to catch these fish, then dump them, dying, back in the sea. Hundreds of millions of such immature fish are needlessly destroyed each year in the Irish Sea alone, to the despair of fishermen – all to comply with EU rules designed to “conserve fish stocks”.
The skipper of the trawler Kiroan, Philip Dell, demonstrated this unnecessary massacre. First he put down an 80mm mesh trawl, of the type insisted on by Brussels, in the name of “cod recovery”. This inevitably snares thousands of baby plaice, which must then be chucked away.
A second trawl with a 110mm mesh – large enough to allow the small fish to escape – came up containing only mature plaice and a few dogfish. Yet if fishermen use the conservation-friendly larger net, they are savagely penalised, losing so many permitted days fishing that it is all but impossible for them to earn a living.
On Thursday, Mr Paterson flew to Aberdeen to address a conference on how the Scottish fishing industry could be made viable within the common fisheries policy. He went at the invitation of the Greenwich Forum, which had been asked to organise the conference by the publicly-funded North East Scotland Economic Forum.
Mr Paterson intended to speak about the horror of his experience on the Kiroan, and of his recent visits to the Faroes, Iceland, Canada and America, where fisheries and fish stocks are thriving – in the absence of such mad rules.
On arrival, however, he was told he would not be permitted to speak. The only speeches would be from CFP supporters. Mr Paterson would merely be permitted to ask a single question, from the floor, of the “experts” on the platform, who know much less about the viability of fisheries than he does.

There is, I am afraid, only one possible response to this nightmare of bureaucratic stupidity. Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam.