[notahacker]

Tbf the fishing ports were some of the most rational Brexit voters. They were aware that EU fisheries policy quotas seriously impaired their ability to catch fish and believed that leaving the EU meant leaving the quotas behind.

Unfortunately for them, they happened to be completely wrong about this (arguably not unpredictably: the UK MMO was more zealous than most European countries about enforcing catch restrictions) so they didn't lose the quota system but did lose an export market.

[jemmyw]

The EU quotas didn't impair them from catching fish, it allowed them to catch fish. The problem for British fishermen being that the fish people like to eat in the UK are the ones that tend to hang out in other countries waters, and vice versa.

Feels like they were just taking out their rage on the decline of their industry, which is much more to do with British govt policy and business consolidation than the EU policy. The govt has shown time and again that they don't really care, speak words and take the opposite or no action. I can't say I have much sympathy, the fishing industry in most countries seems out to destroy itself with over-fishing and is highly resistant to regulation designed to save it from itself.

[notahacker]

> The EU quotas didn't impair them from catching fish, it allowed them to catch fish.

The quotas were a specific limit on how much they could catch, including in domestic waters. A specific gripe with the inshore fleet was that cod quotas were set so low they could in some cases barely avoid hitting their quota limits very quickly fishing off the UK coast. And cod of course, is something they could actually sell to Brits if they were allowed to catch more of it. Of course, the tradeoff was that larger, longer range vessels wanted to be able to fish in other waters, and fish markets wanted to at least be able to attempt to export what we don't eat, so an agreement with the EU was reached. Now it's not unpredictable this agreement didn't involve dismissing DG Mare's views on sustainable fishing levels or denying foreign vessels reciprocal access to British waters, but I wouldn't call the fishermen's hope for considerably fewer restrictions on what they could catch irrational, especially not compared with some of the other rationales...

[jemmyw]

Yes but there's always going to be a quota and at least with an EU one you can catch fish in EU waters not just your own, which is what I meant by it allowing them to catch fish.

[fragmede]

is it rational that they didn't do their homework to find out that the quota wasnt going to be removed once they'd left the EU?

[notahacker]

I'm not sure it's entirely irrational to fail to predict what the government would eventually settle on, especially when said government was at least feigning interest in getting a better deal for fishermen...

Particularly not compared with some of the other Brexit vote rationales

[jemmyw]

What the fishing industry in the UK wanted out of Brexit was pie in the sky though. It's not like the plan was to saw the British isles off the continent and set sail into the Atlantic, so they still had to deal with the fact of fishing in commercially contested waters.

It seemed like their plan was to be able to do more fishing of the kinds of fish that are available around coastal Britain that aren't popular in the UK and sell them to the Europeans. I say plan, I mean "barely thought out idea". Because the reality is that the ships that do that fishing already exist and already have agreements with the processing businesses, which are already in the EU. And fishing is such a tiny part of the UK economy in comparison to some other countries that access was just traded away.