Around this time, the cost of Christmas begins to show up on credit card statements. This year, a new demand will be popping through the national letter box – the cost of Brexit. As parts of the UK are already finding out, the Prime Minister’s promise to “Get Brexit Done” has become, “Get done by Brexit”. Schadenfreude is never a noble sentiment, but there must be some who feel the Scottish fishing industry should have been more careful in what it wished for. Although Aberdeenshire voted overall to remain, a majority of those in the Banff and Buchan constituency voted to leave the EU. Largely due to the presence of Fraserburgh and Peterhead, the latter being the UK’s largest white fish and pelagic port.

Aberdeenshire’s fishing folk are hardworking and hard headed. They have long railed against the unfairness of the EU’s fishing quotas. Despite that hard headedness they swallowed hook, line and sinker the Prime Minister’s whopper that after Brexit, they could have their fishcake and eat it. Although the industry is a big fish in the north east, it represents only 0.2% of the UK economy; a minnow in national terms. Perhaps that’s why EU negotiators took the industry more seriously than their UK counterparts. While fishing communities complain of betrayal and sacrifice, the Foreign Secretary hails a “great deal for the fishing industry”. Its peripheral importance underlined when Fisheries Minister Victoria Prentis, prioritised her local nativity trail over the tiresome drudgery of reading the Brexit Bill. But hey, few in Ms Prentis’ Oxfordshire constituency rely on fishing for a living.

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The impact of Brexit on the fishing industry has been immediate. James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food and Drink, has likened Peterhead fish market to a ghost town. Landings are down by around 20 per cent. Not surprising, given reports of Scottish boats landing their catches in Denmark. If, as Jacob Rees-Mogg claims, British Brexit fish are “better and happier”, the people who catch and transport them certainly aren’t. They’re unlikely to take comfort from Michael Gove’s assurances that the current difficulties are short term and it’s only a “bumpy moment”. It’s not as if Mr Gove has been wrong before. The bad news is the present difficulties are not going away any time soon. They are an unavoidable consequence of leaving the single market. To remain in the market was unacceptable to the Brexit idealogues as it would have meant adhering to EU regulation. Cutting through EU bureaucracy has gone the way of the easiest trade deal in history and that £350 million a week for the NHS. Instead, exporters and hauliers are buried under a mountain of crippling and expensive red tape.

It’s not only fishing. Alarm bells are ringing in farming communities, even before the promise/threat of cheaper imported food kicks in. A friend in the seed potato business finds his product excluded from Europe altogether. A local farmer, reliant on exporting lamb to the EU, can’t forward plan with any certainty. Some exporters of dairy products are already thinking it would be easier to relocate.

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Brexit was never about business, fishing or farming. The Prime Minister is on record as saying, “F**k business”. It was driven by an elite cabal fantasising about a sepia-tinted England (yes, I mean England) that existed only in their imaginations. Their totems are sovereignty, reduced immigration and blue passports. They manipulated the fearful, aggrieved and gullible with promises of a new golden age and boy, did it pay off. The former red wall in England crumbled. Anti-EU sentiment fomented in fishing and agricultural communities fuelled Conservative gains. Although farming and fishing folk tend to be stubborn, the penny might have dropped that, having served their purpose, they have been thrown overboard. Come election time, they might well reflect on the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you: fool me twice, shame on me”.

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