Why Scotland's fishermen and puffins are both celebrating big win over EU

This week, however, our fishing fleet and our feathered friends have common cause for celebration, after an international court confirmed the UK’s right to ban industrial sandeel fishing. The ruling is a major win for Scottish seabirds, and indeed for anyone who values a healthy marine ecosystem around our islands.

For those not in the know, sandeels are a critical source of food for a whole swathe of marine life in the North Sea, including seabirds such as puffins. Two bans for English and Scottish waters were put in place in early 2024, after growing concerns that sandeel stocks were becoming depleted due to intensive, industrial fishing by Danish fishermen.

An inescapable net

Judges at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague last Friday overruled Danish demands that the sandeel fishing ban in our waters be reversed – a win for conservation and for basic fairness for Scottish fishermen.

This hard-fought victory has been a long time coming. For many years on the pinboard above my desk in the House of Commons, there hung a three-inch square of net from a Danish industrial fishing boat. The mesh of the net could have been no more than three millimetres in size – enough to let seawater through, but not much else.

It was given to me 20-odd years ago by a fisherman’s wife from Whalsay in Shetland, whose family was then struggling as a result of limitations imposed on the fishing fleet as part of the Cod Recovery Programme.

Why, she asked, was the burden of rebuilding cod stocks in the North Sea falling exclusively onto British whitefish boats, when the Danish industrial fishery for sandeels (a critical part of the cod food chain just as much as for seabirds) was allowed to continue unhindered? It was a question to which there was really no good answer.

Highly protected marine areas

Freeing ourselves from the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was one of few respectable arguments for Brexit – even if, as subsequent events have shown, the opportunities were somewhat exaggerated. The ability to take a more informed and more responsive approach to fisheries and marine management than that of the CFP (admittedly not a high bar to clear) was the bare minimum we should have expected to gain from our departure.

It is why the court ruling last week has been welcomed as warmly by Scottish fishermen as by conservation groups. Above all the sandeel ban shows that the interests of fishermen and conservationists can absolutely be in harmony when a collaborative approach is taken. That is the model that our governments ought to take forward in future should proposals for highly protected marine areas ever re-emerge.

After all, marine management should not be a zero-sum game. A thriving marine ecosystem around our coasts is in everyone’s interest; sustainable fisheries are the goal of fishermen just as much as anyone else.

What we all want is for our seas to be filled with fish for generations to come. On that, Scottish fishermen and Scottish seabirds are entirely aligned.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland