The blatantly protectionist Common Agricultural Policy is well-known as one of the worst things the European Union does, preventing developing nations from selling agricultural products in a competitive European market. Less well known is the disaster that is the Common Fisheries Policy. Euroskeptic commentator Richard North, who I believe has worked closely with the dying British fising industry, examines the problems in this post at his EU Referendum blog. He notes a publicity stunt by Greenpeace, which arranged for delivery of a load of dead marine life:

This was the by-catch from a two-hour trawl on the Dogger Bank, and comprised 11,000 dead or dying marine species. It included a variety of flatfish, small cod, mackerel, sole, Norway lobster, edible crab and starfish.

The catch represented a fraction of the estimated 720,000 tons of discarded fish returned annually to the North Sea, including some 12 percent (or more) of the total cod and 40 percent of the plaice catch by weight had been discarded.

So far so good. Every fisherman and campaigner would agree that discarding is highly wasteful, and experience from the successful fisheries of Norway, Iceland and the Faroes demonstrate that banning this practice is an essential past of good fisheries management.

But Greenpeace does not make this point. It uses the information to claim that "this type of fishing practice" – and then lumps beam trawling with otter trawling, which is claims are "particularly prone to picking up unwanted species, because they are inherently indiscriminate".

That, in fact, is not true as a matter of principle. Given good design, these nets can be highly selective – the problem being that the rigidities of the CFP prevent the design and development of more selective gear, and prohibit experimentation to reduce by-catch.

North goes on to point out that there are some exclusion zones in the North Sea, notably around oil and gas installations.

These in part may account for the fact that certain species, like haddock, are at a thirty-year high, and that fishermen are taking record catches of large cod, despite scientists' claims that the stock is near exhaustion.

Finally, North notes that, under the proposed EU Constitution, conservation of fish stocks will become the responsibility of the EU itself, and not of member governments. Given the "depradations" of the CFP, this is unlikely to be good for marine life.