Exactly thirty years ago I was Head of Maritime Section at the FCO and negotiating the voisinage agreement on mutual fishing rights in territorial waters between France and the Channel Islands. Memory dims with age, but it is hard to forget the evening in Cherbourg where a meeting with French fishermen became so heated we found ourselves diving into an alley to escape a pursuing group who wished to remonstrate further. In fact, the same fishermen in the same town three years later took hostage, for a day or so, British fisheries enforcement officers, which helped obtain some changes to the agreement in France’s favour in 1994. In 1991, the ire was directed not so much at me, as at the head of the French government delegation, an Enarque from the Quai D’Orsay of superb aristocratic demeanour and French Vietnamese ancestry, who was perhaps not the best choice to explain things to the fleet.
It should be noted that the later British “hostages” said they were fed and wined superbly and had rather a nice time of it.
It is hard to understand whether today the British media or the British government have the worse grasp of the issues at stake in this fisheries dispute. Let me make a few basic points.
Firstly, the Channel Islands were never in the EU and their waters were never part of the Common Fisheries Policy – the more so as both the French and the Channel Islands waters involved are all twelve mile territorial sea and not 200 mile exclusive economic zone. The extent to which this relates to Brexit is therefore much exaggerated.
Secondly, the issue dates back hundreds of years and is concerned with the maintenance of traditional fishing rights within each other’s waters by the French and Channel Islands fishermen. Both sides have always acknowledged these time hallowed rights of access.
Thirdly, the French and Channel Islands fishing communities concerned are inextricably interlinked and indeed intermarried. Certainly thirty years ago French was the first language among the fishermen on both sides (though I am told this is less true now).
To try to explain further, fishermen are taking specific types of catch in specific areas, and their boats are equipped for this. They cannot simply be told to go and catch something different in their state’s “own” area without changing equipment and indeed sometimes boat. To state the obvious, if you are putting down your lobster pots it is not easy to be told to go fish for mackerel somewhere else instead. That is the principle, though I don’t pretend to remember the catches now.
It is not just a technical and financial matter. It is a question of personal identity and survival of communities. Fishing families have been taking the same catch in the same areas for many generations. The boats are inherited, the community set up for the appropriate processing and sales.
In making the voisinage agreement we took care to interact very closely with the fishing communities on each side and learn their stories and history. We heard tales of catches going back centuries, and fishermen viewed access to the sea their fathers had fished as a right that was nothing to do with governments; this was very even. Some Channel Islands fishermen fished certain French waters, and some French fishermen fished certain Channel Island waters. We also heard of bitter disputes between families. Tales of nets cut or pots lifted were recounted with vivid detail, only for it to be subsequently revealed the incident was in 1905 and it was somebody’s great grandfather who did it. These are complex and intermixed communities, and there is rivalry between islands as much as with the French communities. There are cross-cutting community alliances too.
Above all, as in all fishing communities, there was mutual support in the face of the sea, tales of drownings, disasters and long remembered community grief, and of course tales of rescues – of French boats rescuing Channel Island boats, and Channel Island boats rescuing French boats.
These are proud communities. The monumental stupidity of the Tory government in not seeking to understand and talk through the issues, but rather sending in intimidatory gunboats and wildly exacerbating the dispute, is heartbreaking. Of course I understand the Tories don’t actually care about the issue at all and are using anti-French jingoism for electoral purposes, but the poison they have injected will have effects for many decades.
The voisinage agreement that was drawn up and signed off by Exchange of Note between ministers in 1992 (which really did involve me doing stuff with ribbons and sealing wax) was therefore perhaps not what you would expect to see, and bore no relation to the simplistic nostrums being discussed about the dispute this morning. It named specific individual fishing boats, it named individual captains, and detailed exactly where they could exercise their family’s traditional rights to fish. There were “grandfather rights” – inherited, traditional rights that could not be achieved by newcomers. There was the right to replace a boat, but specific and individually tailored limits of the size and type of boat it could be replaced with. There were sunset clauses – I have a recollection many of the rights expired to be renegotiated in 2010, which seemed a long way away in those days. I believe that much of “my” voisinage agreement was replaced by the Granville Bay Agreement of 2000, which sounds to me unwise in decoupling French rights in Channel Island waters from Channel Island rights in French waters, but I was Deputy High Commissioner in Ghana by then and I confess I have not studied the Granville Bay agreement.
The political right today misinterpret this as some kind of English/French territorial dispute. As I hope I have explained, it is nothing of the sort, and none of the fishermen involved would ever call themselves English. The political left must not confuse the fishermen with the beneficiaries of the Channel Islands status as a great international centre for tax evasion and the laundering of illegal money. The beneficiaries of that activity are overwhelmingly not in the Channel Islands at all, but spivs in the lap dancing clubs and penthouses of the City of London. There are few beneficiaries in the Channel Islands beyond the sleazy lawyers who host thousands of paper companies, the political crooks and the token bank facades fronting for London. The fishermen are nothing to do with that world.
I should make very plain that my own negotiations were guided and in reality led by David Anderson, FCO legal adviser and a major influence in the development of the Law of the Sea. But empathy is an essential negotiating skill, and I was much helped by the fact that I grew up myself in an inshore fishing community and from a fishing family. As you may know, my mother was English and I was born in West Runton and grew up in neighbouring Sheringham. My great grandfather John Johnson had been one the last builders of traditional Sheringham fishing boats, and many relatives were still fishing in my childhood. To give you an idea, I have four direct ancestors in this photo of the Augusta lifeboat, including the cox’n at the stern, who is my great, great grandfather John Long. My grandmother had a copy of this postcard and used to tell me we were related to every single man in the photo (which is what is known as NfN, Normal for Norfolk). She could name them all. I believe six generations later my cousin Nick Grice is today still cox of the Sheringham lifeboat.
I shall allow myself to be a bit morbid today. The UK used to have an envied foreign service which valued expertise, diligence and negotiation. It now prizes bluff, jingoism and cheap popularity. We are sending gunboats, not negotiators, to the Channel Islands. Meantime I am being sentenced, probably to prison, this morning for Contempt of Court, for the crime of diligent journalism. O Tempora! O Mores!
You can read something of my case and contribute to my defence fund for an appeal to the Supreme Court here.
UPDATE: The court has been adjourned until Tuesday 11 May at 9:45am, (ostensibly) to enable consideration of mitigating factors submitted this morning. Read Taylor Hudak’s summary of the court hearing here and consult her timeline for a record of her live tweeting as it happened.
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Best wishes and best of luck today Craig. Vive la liberté.
Second that, if I may.
Craig
thinking about you today. This article is a great demonstration of your journalism and commentary.
Matt
Thank you for your powers of reminiscence and the lovely tale of your family In Norfolk, Craig. We will be with you in spirit on this important day today. wishing you good luck and a more certain future, once this is all over.
More power to you Craig. The Tories are a known quantity of timeless corruption and empty flag waving. But even through the last four decades of authoritarian Tory / New Labour rule, there can have been few more blatanty political prosecutions of a truth telling journalist than your treatment at the hands of the Murrells.
Good luck this morning Craig. Wishing you and your family well and hope the judge doesn’t try and make a martyr of you with a ludicrous sentence.
Amazing how this blew up in the last few days, and then was discretely wound down just as voting came to an end. The media was played, and once again eagerly lapped it up without question. Headline news across all channels just before an election, flag waving and gunboat diplomacy. The perfect illustration of how modern Tories work, and how Johnson works. Like his appearances, never any policy or content, just images and easily absorbed memes which burrow into the population’s consciousness. Hospitals, building sites, factories – there are no places which cannot be used as a stage set for Johnson’s propaganda. And of course you will never catch him on a platform for serious debate or interrogation. Funny, that.
This is Trumpian spectacle and situationism to a tee, where old and social media combine in a perfect storm of puppet show politics, cartoon propaganda and cheap emotional manipulative social engineering.
It is ironic, as well as illustrative, Craig, that your carefully and eloquently written explanation of these events comes out on the very same day that you are being arraigned in an ongoing attempt to silence and suppress such thinking. Thinking, evidence and reason is the enemy now.
Thank you for your insightful comment. I concur.
This does read rather like a Norfolk-esque version of Nelson Mandela telling a South African judge to ‘recuse himself from this case’!
It suggests that you are far more highly competent not merely in journalism, but in international law, than those that would sentence you for the crime of ‘choosing the wrong side of the argument’.
As you chose truth rather than perjury, that is perhaps not a surprising denouement.
It takes unprincipled charlatans, wilfully lacking in legal knowledge, to self-righteously proclaim your guilt and necessity for a prison sentence, after all.
Not that I am referring specifically to any Scottish legal figures, you understand.
I am more referring to those from whom they take instruction….
Thank God for someone who knows what they are talking about!
Craig, very best wishes for today , I really hope they let you off with a fine; if they do, please pay it!
I don’t disagree with your sentiments, but the phrase ‘let you off’ is suggestive that Craig did something wrong and they will wave their beneficent hand, mercifully.
Thank you so much for this piece setting out the real story behind the Jersey fishing dispute at a time when you are facing one of the hardest days of your life.
They (the current establishment) must not shut you up! We need you and your ability to speak truth to power and hope you can continue to do that.
I hope the sentence is light and that you are neither imprisoned nor silenced. Keep strong.
Best of luck today Craig. Regarless of the outcome, you can rest assured that future historians will look favourably on your efforts to reestablish fairness, decency and justice in these troubling times.
Hopefully you sleep in your own bed tonight, Craig.
DLTBGYD.
Happily I doubt that you will get a prison sentence; they can’t risk that. The PR dictates a massive fine, and very little publicity.
Where is the NUJ ? Does it still exist and have a mouth ? If so, its taped shut.
Best wishes and good luck for today..
Abune them aw ye tak your place Craig. Our strength comes from truth, sincere regards from the Isle of Skye.
FCO: The fish rots from the head down….
All the best Craig.
Lady Dorrian says the court needs additional time to make a decision in the sentencing of Craig Murray.
Perhaps Lady Dorrian forgot that the election results were not likely to be published by Friday lunchtime ……………..
No question about it. If ever more proof were needed that this is an entirely political persecution.
Of course its a political prosecution, as was Mark Hirst’s, and the decision in the Dugdale Campbell defamation case, and when you see the establishment journalists walking around after jigsaw and in some cases actually naming a complainant you know that the fix is in.
To think some of us were pondering, in times gone by, whether or not Assange could come to Scotland to seek parity, no f*cking chance.
A call from Bute House to her ladyship? Also known as influencing a judge. Sturgeon will have been taught about that before she became a form-filling solicitor.
It’s looking like no majority for the SNP, although it will probably be close. Clydebank and Milngavie result expected within 10 minutes. Swing to Tories away from SNP in Aberdeen Donside.
If Sturgeon loses so many seats she has to resign, that makes a conviction less likely. I’m not sure why people are talking about a fine. We want an acquittal!
6% swing from SNP to Tories in Aberdeen Donside.
2% swing from SNP to Tories in the Western Isles.
6% swing from SNP to Labour in Clydebank and Milngavie.
No majority for the SNP at Holyrood.
Get out, Sturgeon, you offspring of Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban when they came on a Scottish holiday.
Increasing obedience in the past year because of the virus-themed clampdown may help keep a lot of votes in the hands of the SNP (in Scotland) and the Tories (in northern England) from morons who just “vote for the government” – given how both Sturgeon and Johnson have been on the TV an awful lot telling us what to do and saying they care so much about us – BUT high turnout is bad for the SNP and maybe the juggernaut of boneheaded patriotism is careening off the road at long last.
10% swing from SNP to Tories in Banffshire and Buchan Coast
4% swing from Labour to SNP in Dundee City West.
Support for independence or for parties advocating independence (% of total for constituencies and lists):
2014 referendum: 44.7% (turnout 84.6%)
2016 election: SNP + Greens: 47.7% (turnout 55.8%)
2021 election: SNP + Greens + Alba: ? (turnout ?)
More wisdom from the man who should be Scotland’s first president. But here we are. keeping our fingers crossed for Craig – all the best, CM.
Craig – thanks for taking the time at this difficult period to illustrate once again your huge breadth of knowledge in experience in government affirs. It is a tragedy that peole like you continue to be ignored or even vilified by the current Scottish Government.
Best wishes for today’s sentencing decision.
A nice touch to write this artice when you have other, more pressing matters to distract you.
I don’t suppose any of the London Press have bothered to look into the facts of this Channel Islands story.
If -and I can’t believe they will do this- you find yourself at her majesty’s pleasure, I think a book on why the UK civil service and diplomatic corp has destroyed itself, would be of great interest.
Bon chance, as they say in the harbours
So the torture continues for Craig!
Cruel and unusual punishment: a phrase in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. The precise definition varies by jurisdiction, but typically includes punishments that are arbitrary, unnecessary, overly severe compared to the crime, or not generally accepted in society.
Let’s hope that when this matter is considered furth of Scotland, the remnant of Feudalism that masquerades as a criminal justice system here is placed under appropriate international, scrutiny informed by Enlightenment values.
It is a disgrace to Scotland.
Standard approach nowadays with the corrupt governments of the UK. Continued delays to drain finances and stupid over the top costs to deter dissent. May they all get cancer and die in agony.
Though perhaps blessed at least with a sense of irony?
“It is a disgrace to Scotland”
It sure is.
I have for a long time wanted (in a wishy-washy way) to move to Scotland. No longer.
I think the SNP’s apparently-unshakeable grip on power is behind all this political corruption; the threat of being unseated in an election at least focuses politicians’ minds on not being too blatant. I presume that come independence, the SNP will dissolve, having served its purpose; and the corruption might go away, or at least diminish.
Only then will I revisit the matter of moving.
I can’t read the level of irony here. But for those who have lined their pockets from $NP rule since 2007 a lot of the “purpose” of the $NP has already been achieved. Next aim…even more $.
I presume that come independence, the SNP will dissolve, having served its purpose; and the corruption might go away, or at least diminish…
A very obvious reason why independence will never come under the SNP…
Well at least not under the leadership of Sturgeon the Betrayer.
I listened in this morning.
I was pissed-off at the way she constantly interrupted the defence’s arguments in mitigation. Let the guy make his case, for goodness’ sake!
I’m boiling-mad that Milady retired to consider; and then returned with no decision.
I think she wanted to reconvene on Monday; there was some problem with that, so she retired again. I missed her final decision on when she’s going to reconvene and deliver this damned sentence.
Craig’s punishment seems to be depending on Scotland’s election result at the weekend. This is where we are at the moment in Scotland, shocking stuff to be witnessing. Craig’s lawyer was excellent today.
On the matter of Mr Murray’s sentence, I’m somewhat amazed by the surprise some posters have shown at yet further delay in the case. It isn’t really a matter of criminal justice. It is a political trial no less than any of the historic show trials. As such, the object isn’t about justice at all but to punish those that don’t accept the ruling narrative. Mr Murray challenged that and now he must pay.
Albeit that the sentence is dressed up in legal procedure, using courts and judges with their ermine gowns with red crosses or whatever. Understand this and all surprise should vanish.
One of the first lessons of living in prison is don’t be surprised if things don’t go as you hoped, and after one learns this lesson, then no amount of injustice or political maneuvering comes as a surprise. Another thing to learn is how to keep yourself warm when your body is cold.
~
Those in power think time is on their side and that they can delay with no consequence, and all I can say is another thing I learned in prison is they are wrong and they don’t deserve to be in power. There are always consequences and the consequence grow rapidly when injustice is pushed down our throats. Some things are hard to swallow, but after awhile, you learn to take the medicine of injustice. Learning this is a hard lesson, but if you live and you hold onto your sense of fairness at the same time, then you will be a better man or women. Then you will be able to help others with conviction.
~
Nobody should be in prison for telling the truth, and the fact that the truth in this matter and so many others is so obvious to so many, and it is like a knife cutting through our sense of humanity, means to me that things are fixing to change big time and while I don’t want a conflagration, without direct action, ain’t nothing gonna get better for the peasants amongst us.
~
Proud to be a peasant myself and sensing some serious resolve firming amongst many who care about the scales of justice.
~
Peace,
BK
@Buffalo_Ken I think you put that rather well.
I’m under the impression that Jersey sells/lands most of its fish catch in France, so I suspect those folk won’t want to rock the boat as they say.
Incidentally I see the b*stards have given you a stay of execution until Tuesday. They’re just f*cking with your mind again.
Good luck with Tuesday.
As a lifelong reader of French belles lettres, one of my points of contact with the Channel Islands is Victor Hugo’s novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866), dating from his own self-imposed exile from Napoleon III’s Second Empire, in which he depicts the Channel Islanders as “ce petit peuple, severe et doux”. Also that my late parents visited them in 1939 and that one of my late aunts (a great admirer of La Belle France who was fully bilingual in both French and English) regularly sailed over to them from England with her late partner.
As a retired solicitor, I am perfectly content to share in the opprobrium cast upon “sleazy lawyers”. However I note that the elementary distinction between unlawful tax evasion and the universally practised lawful tax avoidance appears to have escaped your attention.
I live within a long-established fishing community on the east coast of England and have been privileged over the years to have many of its members as my friends and clients. To a man they have supported Brexit in order to take back control of our fisheries.
You will recall that the dispute between France and the States of Jersey over the Minquiers and Ecrehous Reefs was decided in 1953 by the International Court of Justice in favour of Jersey. Upholding the Rule of Law in international relations is, I am sure you will agree, always to be preferred to bloodthirsty jingoism, all members of the United Nations being committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes.
“all members of the United Nations being committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes”
It would be nice if that were the case, but it is manifestly not, other than theoretically. The US has headed for war without UN approval far too often, and Britain tags along. Iraq 2003 for example.
Thank you for explaining this. Nowhere in our great press do they explain this at all. No facts are checked and it’s kept childishly simple for the ‘proles’ Good luck on the 11th, I hope the way the case went this morning is a good indicator for you.
Actually, there is a decent enough article in the Guardian, explaining things from the viewpoint of Jersey fishermen, who do not blame the French, but Brexit for introducing new regulations. Interesting to note that although Jersey is not part of the UK, one of them claims that Boris Johnson is putting Jersey under pressure not to compromise – the perfect illustration of how he uses incidents like these to play to the ignorant gallery and bolster his fake patriotic narrative.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/07/jersey-fishers-on-survival-after-brexit
Johnson is only interested in what the British media headlines say, and their effect on his popularity. He doesn’t care about what the reactions of of Jersey fishermen may be.
Yes, we know that. That is my point.
He’ll probably quietly make peace next week though, now the election is over. The only obstruction would be a revolt of ERG, and the Brexit-nutters, who want their war, or at least a prolonged confrontation.
Decent article in the Guardian is an oxymoron.
Try reading it.
Tories as shamelessly dishonest as ever. But who can trust an opposition that claims it lost Hartlepool because of the politics of a former leader who won the seat twice?
And Mandelson blamed it on Corbyn and Brexit; we take lessons from a self-interested, money-grubbing, shyster like Mandelson the day hell freezes over!
He may have given up the position of leader, but he hasn’t given up the post of Blame Sponge in Chief.