Fishermen of Hastings have a fight on their hands
Adam Nicholson

Daily Telegraph - 29/10/2002

The Gents lavatory in Hastings station is fitted with ultra-violet bulbs, not for a groovy nightclub effect at the stand-ups, but because in ultra-violet light you can't see your veins and, if you can't see your veins, you can't shoot up.

But the 2,000-odd addicts in the town (only 400 of them in any kind of rehab programme) know how to get around this strange and nifty device: outside in the daylight, they trace their veins in biro on the skin before entering the ultra-violet zone.

It's a tatty, broken and poor town for the South of England, with high unemployment, a high level of mental illness, almost a quarter of the population on benefit and some of the worst rates of violent crime, burglary and car theft in the country.

But that was Notting Hill only a few years ago, and Hastings already has its share of new trendy money, at least in the steep and pretty streets of the old town. Paula Yates had a house here.

Fashionable gardeners and eco-business entrepreneurs have moved in. Property speculators have long since Hoovered up the prime sites. Council boosters talk of a £400 million regeneration budget that is about to float Hastings into a new existence as something resembling Sausalito, the redeveloped settlement on San Francisco Bay.

But behind all this, something else, of real and great value, is dying, or worse than that, being killed off. For at least 1,000 years, there has been a sea-fishery from Hastings beach. It was certainly there before the rise of Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood and is still there - just - as those ports have gone into terminal decline. There are 30 boats registered at Hastings, still employing 80-odd fishermen and it is still the largest beach fishery in Europe.

The modern boats here are glass fibre or steel, but most of the fleet is still made up of the beautifully sturdy, flat-bottomed, clinker-built boats, blunt-nosed so that they can be dragged by motor winch up the beach without digging in, lute-sterned so that, as they come in through the breaking surf, they are pushed ashore.

It looks antiquated, what the European Commission calls "an artisan fishery", as if it scarcely belongs in the modern world. But what looks like its drawbacks are in fact its advantages. The Hastings beach-fishery is not a hangover from an old way of doing things, but a model of how sea-fishing will have to be conducted in future.

It is a local business, the fishing grounds stretching between Beachy Head in the west and Dungeness to the north-east, still called by the names they have been called for centuries: Back of the Sand, Hole in the Sand, the Mud and the Bank, Hooks Hard and Cliff End Hard, Leezes and Shingle Beck, the sort of names Sussex farmers have always given their fields, known places whose fertility is nurtured and from which crops can be taken year after year and century after century.

And it is a seasonal fishery, the boats turning in spring to sole and plaice, in summer to lobster and crabs, and just now to the cod that migrate down the Channel from the North Sea.

If you talk to the fishermen, what is uppermost in their mind is the idea, as Paul Joy, the chairman of the Fishermen's Protection Society, put it, that "we want our children to do it". Out to sea lies a field of golden eggs and there is no point in killing the goose. She must be tended, not because of nature conservation but on the economic grounds that the farm has to be kept in good heart.

Besides, small fish don't get the price. If the Hastings boats set nets of 3.125in mesh, they end up with tons of tiny and valueless sole which should have been next year's income.

If the big valuable cod are in, they won't use a mesh under six inches, so that the codlings can escape and grow bigger and fatter for next time. It is this attitude that has led the Sea Fish Authority to call the practice of the Hastings fishermen "as near perfect a fishery as could be devised".

But, of course, Hastings is part of a bigger world. Nearly all the sole they catch are exported and the price is set at European levels. The strong pound means that price has been reduced to £80 for a 50lb box of sole, which is less than they were getting 30 years ago. The average income of a Hastings fisherman is less than £100 a week. None of them, they say, could afford to do it unless their wives worked, too.

At the same time, their ability to survive on the cod fishery in the winter is threatened by the industrial-scale depredations that have been made into the cod stocks by the overpowered and underpoliced fishing fleets of the rest of Europe.

For year after year, the fisheries ministers of the European Union have agreed to take the course of least resistance, to let their fleets continue fishing, to impose minimal limitations, to suggest paltry decommissioning schemes, even to continue subsidising the building of newer and more powerful boats.

So deep has that damage been that, last week, the EC scientists proposed a ban on all fishing of cod, hake, haddock, whiting, flatfish, shrimp and prawns across wide swaths of European seas, perhaps for up to 12 years, almost certainly for the next five.

One of the paradoxes of the present crisis - a crisis brought about by a lack of government and a persistent failure of political courage - is that the Hastings fishery and other artisan fisheries like it will be swept up in the ban, the fishermen will have nothing to fish over the winter and the fishery will die.

Is there an answer? To my amazement, Paul Joy suggested it: join the euro so that their sole could fetch a realistic price; set up a truly powerful European regulatory authority, with its own investigative and police force, which could ensure that the strict multinational policy decided by the EU was imposed and kept to; and remove the bad influence of short-sighted and self-serving national governments on EU fishery policy. Europhilia will be the saving of the Hastings fishermen.