The last thing Britain needs is an all-out trade war with France

Editorial: The first task of the British and French governments is to de-escalate the tensions – and tone down the threats and counter-threats

Fishing contributes about one-tenth of 1 per cent to the national income of each country (Dave Brown)

In normal, placid times, the routine inspection of a couple of fishing vessels doesn’t trouble news editors or cabinet ministers.

Of course, Brexit means that times will not be normal and placid for some considerable time, and thus the detention of two British boats in the English Channel by the French authorities is being treated in some political and media quarters as a virtual act of war. Or, at least, as a casus belli for a trade war that both sides will surely lose. This is absurd.

The first task of the British and French governments is to de-escalate the tensions, tone down the threats and counter-threats, and allow the usual brand of Brexit balm to be applied to the latest flare-up – an extended grace period while the prosaic business of the granting of licences can be sorted out by the French, Jersey, Guernsey and British authorities (including the SNP administration in Holyrood, given that Scottish fisherfolk are involved).

Without wishing to disrespect coastal communities in any territory, an all-out trade war between Europe’s second- and third-largest economies over fish is simply not worth it.

In each country, fishing contributes about one-tenth of 1 per cent to the national income, and has long since ceased to be of any sort of strategic importance. Given that fish don’t recognise territorial waters, it is one of the most internationalised of industries, and one that demands cooperation – and yet, ironically, it is an area in which patriotic fury is quickly aroused over the slightest infringement of national integrity.

There is something about Anglo-French rivalry that too easily turns to suspicion and hostility – the same process can be observed with the rows about refugee boats crossing the Channel. Yet there are deep paradoxes.

The UK and France are allies, and the blood of their soldiers has intermingled on the battlefields of Europe: in 1940 Winston Churchill proposed a political union of the two states. The European Union was sort of an extension of the Entente Cordiale, and a useful thing within which to subsume these awkward clashes of national interest when they arose.

With Britain outside the EU, and with France resuming her traditional role of political leadership in Brussels, the old safeguards have all gone, and relations between Britain and the assertive France of Emmanuel Macron are at a depressingly low ebb.

There is, no doubt, something very special about fishing communities; there is something precarious and hazardous about how they make their living, meaning that they can feel left behind and abandoned by faraway governments. Yet their interests, as with every other part of a modern dynamic economy, have to be balanced against those of other communities that require support.

It’s worth recalling that, for all its manifest faults, the EU’s common fisheries policy, combined with the single market’s seamless operation, worked relatively harmoniously and well for fisheries and the shellfish trade over the past few decades.

Like their counterparts in, say, vehicle production or finance, the fishing sector in every EU state has had to change and adjust, and sometimes that has been painful.

However, there was always one overarching set of principles regarding access; the certainty that any catch could be exported, imported or processed profitably and without obstruction; and one authority dishing out the quotas and overseeing regulation across the English Channel and out into the North Sea and the Atlantic.

Now, all of that has been replaced by the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which in truth is a compromise that neither side likes very much.

Fishing, rather like the Northern Ireland protocol in the withdrawal agreement, is serving as proxy for the continuation of the Brexit process by other means. Where will it end?

It could all too easily still escalate and poison relationships for decades, and there will be no victors. President Macron has an election to win, and Boris Johnson a festive, Europhobic party to appease. There is, sadly, a political dividend for each in a war of words.

It is no game, though. If the British applied the treaty strictly, they could destroy the livelihoods of blameless French families and fishing towns, whose fishermen and women have fished in UK and Channel Island waters for decades, if not centuries.

If the French were to do the same to the exports of British cars, they would render much of the British auto industry unviable.

Already, UK exports to the EU are, against global trends, stubbornly refusing to pick up now that the worst of the Covid pandemic is over. Britain depends on trade with the EU for its prosperity. Brexit, as ever, is a lose-lose deal, but at the moment it is the British who look to have the most to lose.