LONDON — Just a day after the foreign ministers of the world’s richest economies met at the G-7 summit here to applaud themselves for the return of international diplomacy, France and Britain found themselves sending gunboats to sea in a spat over shellfish.
“We’re ready for war,” blared the Daily Mail tabloid in all caps. Not over bivalves, surely? But never underestimate the hot-button politics of fishing rights. It almost scuttled the Brexit trade deal between Britain and the European Union — and the aftereffects are still being sorted out today.
As of Thursday morning, Britain had sent not one but two Royal Navy ships — the HMS Tamar and HMS Severn — to the little island of Jersey in the English Channel. Jersey is a British Crown dependency, although it’s about 14 miles off the French coast.
France responded by deploying the Military Ops ship Athos to carry out a “patrol mission.” A second French vessel, the Themis, with the maritime service was also sent.
Images of the harbor of Saint Helier on the island of Jersey showed dozens of French fishing trawlers and dredgers bobbing in the waters inside and just off the port, firing smoke and light flares.
The French fleet is angry because Jersey is requiring that skippers who want a license to rake the seafloor deploy the most modern equipment and also prove they have fished in the island’s waters in previous years — requirements that some captains complain are expensive or hard to fulfill.
The fight comes as Britain and the European Union split — but are still tussling over fishing rights, sustainability and quotas, and the ministate of Jersey is caught in the post-Brexit middle and muddle.
The French fisherfolk threatened to “blockade” the harbor, and they did stop cargo ships for a few hours from entering or exiting. In one scene captured on video, a French boat also could be seen ramming another vessel.
But by Thursday afternoon, the French had retreated, after a meeting between Jersey fisheries authorities and representatives of the French fleet.
In the early hours, no one was certain how the day would go. Josh Dearing, owner of the Jersey Catch fishing company, told the Press Association: “I looked from the shore this morning and it was just like a sea of red lights and flares already going off at sea. It was like an invasion.”
Sameer Al-Doumy
AFP/Getty Images
The HMS Tamar, a British naval vessel, patrols the waters off the British island of Jersey on May 6.
English and Jersey fishing boats were also in the waters, creating the potential for conflict. It would not be the first time that British and French fleet tangled. In 2018, in an episode dubbed the “Great Scallop War,” the antagonists purposefully slammed into each other’s boats in a skirmish over fishing rights.
War rhetoric has been a recurrent theme. French fishermen earlier complained that their own government had “declared war” on them by pursuing plans for an offshore wind farm to the south of Jersey.
This week, the attention shifted toward escalating tensions with Britain, when France’s Minister for the Sea, Annick Girardin, threatened retaliatory measures over post-Brexit fishing rights.
“Regarding Jersey, I remind you of the delivery of electricity along underwater cables,” she told lawmakers, noting that the island state gets most of its power from mainland France.
“We’ll do it if we have to,” Girardin said, without going into details.
Jersey — officially the Bailiwick of Jersey — is not a member nation of the United Kingdom but a self-governing British Crown Dependency, and Britain provides for its defense. The 100,000 residents speak English (and often French), use the pound sterling and mostly make their money by providing offshore financial services.
Unlike in Britain, the rising tensions did not dominate the news in France on Thursday, with news channels and newspapers instead debating topics such as the complicated legacy of Napoléon Bonaparte.
Speaking to Agence-France Presse, the junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, vowed that France “won’t be intimidated.”
He said he had earlier spoken to David Frost, the British cabinet minister responsible for relations with the European Union.
“Our wish is not to have tensions but to have a quick and full application of the [Brexit] deal,” said Beaune.
Don Thompson, president of Jersey Fishermen’s Association, told The Washington Post that the French were deploying “intimidating and bullying tactics.”
The threat to cut off electricity to the island would, if carried out, have huge consequences. “Hospitals would close, babies would die in hospitals. It’s not something taken lightly,” he said.
Thompson described the scene Thursday morning: He said there were about 100 French trawlers sitting in the mouth of local harbor, and two British Royal Navy ships and a French patrol ship on the scene. “So there’s a little bit of tension.”
He said the French boats were “stopping the food supply chain” as the “big ferry that sails between here and the mainland, carrying 95 percent of our food, is stuck in the port.”
The French fishermen are upset that they now have to get licenses from the Jersey authority, which have various conditions, including on the styles and types of fishing equipment allowed.
“We’re saying to our government, if you remove conditions from their license, there’s no point in any of us having licenses — that’s what licenses are there for,” Thompson said. “We don’t always like conditions on licenses, but they are there so we have a future and fish stocks are cared for properly.”
Jersey is a unique entity. Though it lies closer to France than Britain, it is not a part of the European Union, though before Brexit, it was effectively treated as if it were in the bloc when it came to the free trade of goods.
Now that Britain is out of the European Union and new Brexit trade agreements and access rights are coming into force, locals in Jersey are feeling an impact.
Thompson said that since the start of the year, French fleets have been “fishing in our waters, taking 100 tons of scallops every week, while our boats have been banned from landing the same scallops into the E.U. because of the downgrading of our waters. . . . That’s left our fishermen here under hardship because they can’t land their catch and export it to France, but they watch as French have taken 1,500 tons of those same scallops out of those waters and land them freely back into the E.U. There’s a level of discrimination that’s already come into the situation.”
Noack reported from Paris.
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