At 4am on 24 April 2019, 25 brass players, two percussionists and a conductor piled into a coach in Hull for a 200-mile drive to London. It was a Wednesday morning and it had been touch and go whether all of them would be able to get time off from their day jobs to make the trip. Seven hours later, they stood on the quayside at Greenwich, as Princess Anne swung a bottle of champagne at the looming yellow hull of the UK’s newest and biggest whitefish trawler.
Many of the people gathered that day had voted for Brexit in the EU referendum and hopes were high that it would usher in a new era for a British industry that had been dwindling for years. The Kirkella was the larger of two new boats built by the private company UK Fisheries in 2018, at a combined cost of nearly £59m, landing fish at Hull for the first time in a decade. The Princess Royal summed up the optimistic mood on the quayside when she offered her congratulations “to the owner for their investment in the future of fishing”. As the bottle smashed against the boat, the players launched into a lung-busting rendition of Hearts of Oak. Before they had even finished playing, recalls Tony Newiss, cornet player and chairman of the City of Hull Band, the heavens opened and everyone got drenched.
Two years on, the scene could serve as a portent of troubles that were to come. Snarled up in negotiations over fishing rights, which now have to be negotiated with each of the countries in whose waters it works, the UK’s last distant-water trawler sits idle, unable to work in its normal patch off the coasts of Norway, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The vessel has not only been blindsided by the repercussions of Brexit, but is caught up in a longer tale of decline that goes back to the cod wars of the 20th century and a wider one of the unfolding climate crisis. Those with long memories can recall a time when there was enough cod and haddock for everyone in the seas around the UK, but warming waters have driven them north into the deeper, colder waters of the Nordic states. As a result of these changes in fish stocks, and the territorial squabbles that result, today’s fishing industry only represents 0.12% of the UK’s economy.
For the fishing community of Humberside, on the austerity-battered north-east coast of England, it is as if a slow-motion car crash has suddenly been fast-forwarded. The Kirkella is a super-efficient factory ship that processes and freezes the fish it catches and supplies one in every 12 fillets of cod and haddock eaten in the UK’s fish-and-chip shops. At an emotional adjournment debate in the House of Commons a fortnight ago, Emma Hardy, Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle, didn’t mince her words. In one failed negotiation, she said, “the secretary of state for the environment has handed…
Read More: End of the line? How Brexit left Hull’s fishing industry facing extinction