Newton Emerson: English Channel disruption is the future

Opinion is divided on whether there is a Brexit connection to this week’s closure of French ports.

The UK government says it was purely Covid-related. Newspapers report unofficial briefings to the contrary. Whether London or Paris are fully explaining themselves is beside the point. English Channel disruption is the future, with Brexit a context if not always a reason, as has long been predicted.

At the start of EU-UK trade talks nine months ago, British and French ministers were warned by their officials that French fishing boats would immediately blockade Channel ports in any and every row over access to UK waters.

Calais is particularly vulnerable, with one-fifth of the UK’s entire trade in goods passing through a harbour mouth only a few hundred metres wide. Just two small boats are sufficient to obstruct it.

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There was an element of negotiating drama in March’s statements on the issue. More telling has been the weary fatalism from the British fishing fleet.

“As day follows night, there will be blockades,” the UK’s National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations told a press conference in June.

“They’ve done it for much less in the past. That’s just the nature of the beast you’re dealing with.”

In August, the North Devon Fishermen’s Association noted that French boats must lose out in any deal as they currently hold the highest share of fishing quotas in the Channel. As a result, “they will blockade and that will stop everything being moved – goods plus people”.

There does not need to be a Brexit or even a British provocation to cause similar scenes.

In 2018, French fishermen objected to the EU allowing electric “pulse” technology, mainly used by Dutch trawlers. To express their displeasure they blockaded Calais by sea and Boulogne by road, stopping all ferries from England. The same ports were blocked in 2009 in a row with the EU over quotas.

Fishing itself need not be involved.

French farmers blockaded Calais and Boulogne in 1999 because they did not think British retailers were buying enough of their beef (France still banned UK beef at the time).

French lorry drivers blocked channel ports throughout the 1990s as part of nationwide strikes over pay and conditions.

More recently, the gilet jaune movement threatened to block ports for reasons it could barely explain.

Beer cans and potatoes

The mother of all modern Channel blockades was in August 1980, when French fishermen sealed off Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, Le Havre and Cherbourg in a dispute with their government over fuel prices and employment laws.

An extraordinary archive report on this from the Washington Post is free online and worth looking up. It records how ferries and hovercraft were diverted to Belgium to collect tens of thousands of stranded British tourists, in an operation inevitably compared to Dunkirk.

Several British ferries rammed through French fishing boats to escape, including one at Dunkirk captained by a veteran of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation.

In Pythonesque scenes, French fishermen pelted it with potatoes while British passengers hurled back beer cans.

Another ferry blared Land of Hope and Glory as it broke into Cherbourg, while the French attacked it with flares. British tourists then engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with fisherman on the quayside to let the vessel tie up. The Daily Mail compared it to the Battle of Agincourt and quoted Henry V: "Gentlemen in England, now abed, shall think themselves accursed they were not here."

All the above blockades occurred while France and the UK were in the EU or the EEC, with fishing a European competence. The full Common Fisheries Policy has been in place since 1983 and the single market since 1993. Although this may not have prevented every possible dispute, it created a political and legal expectation of everything swiftly returning to normal.

Regular renegotiations

Less than one week from now, a new normal begins. Even with a deal on fishing, the French fleet faces a regular renegotiation of its access that is certain to be a disappointment.

Even with UK-EU trade deal, the British government hopes for level playing field freedoms capable of upsetting French unions. The potential for upsetting French farmers appears limitless, with French hauliers not far behind.

Any agricultural trade deal the UK signs with the rest of the world will put Channel trade in jeopardy.

Just as often, perhaps, Britain will have had nothing to do with a dispute in France, yet still find itself blockaded as an easy and weakened target.

How will any of these arguments be resolved with an EU that considers itself to be dealing, at best, with a delinquent rival? Each incident is likely to set off another protracted negotiation: there will be no swift return to the status quo.

For Ireland, stuck behind the British landbridge, the question is whether its lorries and direct ferries will be waved through the barricades.

Precedent suggests that sometimes they will, sometimes they will not, and often it will be impractical to distinguish them even if the will is there.