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France suspends retaliation against UK in fishing row as talks continue

French President Emmanuel Macron announced that retaliatory measures against Britain over an escalating row about fishing rights will not be implemented on Tuesday. The UK's Brexit minister will travel to Paris on Thursday for further talks.

Published: 2 November 2021 08:32 CET
A French fishing boat off the coast of Jersey.
A French fishing boat off the coast of Jersey. Photo: Sameer Al Doumy/AFP

Discussions “will continue” between France, the UK and the European Commission, Macron said on the sidelines of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, ruling out the application of retaliatory measures because “it’s not while we’re negotiating that we’re going to impose sanctions”.

The UK’s Brexit minister David Frost said he had accepted an offer from French Europe Minister Clément Beaune to meet in Paris. “I look forward to our talks in Paris on Thursday,” Frost tweeted.

 Announcing the invitation to Frost to come for “in-depth discussions”, Beaune tweeted that Britain had sent “the first signals… to accelerate exchanges”.

France had vowed to subject British imports to tighter controls starting from Tuesday, in a bitter row over fishing rights that has grown since Brexit took full effect at the start of the year.

It had said it would prevent British fishermen offloading their catches in French ports, after Britain and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey declined to issue dozens of French boats with licences to fish in their waters after Brexit.

READ ALSO EXPLAINED Why are France and the UK fighting about fish?

In a statement, a UK government spokesperson added: “We welcome the French government’s announcement that they will not go ahead with implementing their proposed measures as planned tomorrow.

“As we have said consistently, we are ready to continue intensive discussions on fisheries, including considering any new evidence to support the remaining license applications,” the spokesperson said.

“We welcome France’s acknowledgement that in-depth discussions are needed to resolve the range of difficulties in the UK/EU relationship.”

Macron said he had “confidence in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to take seriously” the French proposals and for the discussions to lead to a “result”.

“For 10 months the results have been too slow, if this new method allows us to have a result, I hope we will give it a chance,” he said.

Britain has also threatened to step up inspections of EU fishing vessels.

The head of the regional fisheries committee of France’s northern Hauts-de-France region, Olivier Lepretre said on Monday he feared that fishermen would be turned back from British waters “over the slightest issue.”

If provoked, he said, French fishermen, who have staged protests in Channel ports in recent months, would “show some muscle” and carry out further action.

France says that dozens of French fishermen are waiting for licences to ply waters between six and 12 miles from British shores, and in particular around Jersey.

After talks with Johnson on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Rome on Sunday, Macron said the two leaders had agreed to work on “practical and operational measures” but insisted: “The ball is in Britain’s court.”

Johnson however denied that Britain’s position had changed, insisting France must back down first.

A day earlier he had complained to EU chief Ursula von der Leyen over the “completely unjustified” French threats and raised the possibility of invoking a Brexit dispute tool for the first time, drawing the EU into the row.

Member comments

  1. Talks with Frost😮 Does frost even know what this is about? Judging by his previous endeavers, I would imagine he will muddy the waters even more. Of course all the British guttersnipe press with the Daily Mail at the forefront will be stating that France has surrendered once again.

  2. It seems the lessons of Trump have not been learned…you cannot apply normal diplomacy to an egomaniac/idiot (take your pick).

    The UK has always been a ‘have your cake and eat it’ style government that will demand and take all it can from international relations…so the softly softly diplomatic approach results in exactly the situation we see at the moment – the UK constantly demanding more, more and more, throwing tantrums and issuing threats…

    It would be nice to see the EU and France stop pandering to them and actually tell them, in suitable diplomatic speach, to bog off once and for all.

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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