Why are cars and fishing so essential to post-Brexit trade?

Anglers blame indiscriminate trawlers for overfishing (Alamy)

To a fair degree, the now five-year long Brexit debate comprises as a series of reruns of arguments rehearsed and settled many decades ago.   

So it is now with the two present hot Brexit topics – fish and cars. Or, rather, fish versus cars, on one reading of the situation. The idea – putting it crudely – that Britain’s fishing communities were cynically sacrificed to continental competitors when Ted Heath (a Conservative premier of a different stripe) took Britain into Europe in 1972 has long held sway. According to some accounts, one casualty of this exercise in realpolitik was a wholesale wet fish business in Aberdeen owned by Michael Gove’s father. At any rate, the Common Fisheries Policy has long been held to have inflicted cruel damage on places such as Hull and Grimsby, once thriving communities built on the success and hard dangerous work of their trawlermen and trawlerwomen.

The argument runs that Heath took the view that fishing, despite its ancient heritage, was far less important to the British economy than manufacturing, including the motor industry. So it was “given away”. In Heath’s world view, at long last French, German and Italian motorists would soon have unimpeded access to the Triumph Stag, Austin Allegro, Jaguar XJ-S and other fruits of our national champion, the British Leyland Motor Corporation. Millions of jobs and the health of the balance of payments depended on expanding trade in such manufactures, and not on cod. You might think that a rational if tough choice was made in the national interest; or a straight betrayal. The emotional tug of the fishing fields remains, and the bitterness, witnessed by that referendum stunt when Nigel Farage was water cannoned by Bob Geldof on the Thames at Westminster.