Marine Environment

In order to achieve the policy objectives of rebuilding fishing communities and ensuring proper environmental management of fish stocks, we must re-establish control of Britain's 200-mile exclusive fishing zone. If each country caught fish in areas that were exclusive to itself, there would be an incentive to conserve and nurture fish stocks. We would restore respect for the ocean's providence and we would rebuild fishing communities.

Once a community has a secure freedom to fish, it will then have the power in its own hands to determine its own existence – which will require tempering its freedom, with its technical, economic and ecological wisdom.

This secure freedom may also lead to fishing communities being able to co-operate internationally with other similarly secure fishing communities Europe-wide, in order to reach where possible, mutually respectful arrangements which benefit each other's economies and ecologies.

RE-ESTABLISH 200-MILE EXCLUSION ZONE

a. Re-establish control of Britain's 200-mile exclusive fishing zone, so that we may rebuild our fishing industry and ensure the proper environmental management of fish stocks.

b. No permits for foreign fishing boats.

c. Assistance for coastal communities to re-build their economies and protect their natural resources.

SURVEY BEAUFORT'S DYKE – a dirty secret, of which few are aware and nobody in authority wants to talk about!

In what has been called "supreme environmental negligence", Beaufort's Dyke is an area between Scotland and Northern Ireland where tons of bombs and chemical munitions were dumped between 1945 until the 1970s. The attitude was "out of sight, out of mind".

Lying between the Rhins of Galloway and Northern Ireland, it is 25 nautical miles long, 2 miles wide and 700–1,000 feet deep.

Corroding munitions can now leach chemicals into the water, the seabed and into aquatic life including fish that we eat.

It can't all be "dug up" again, but we should at least survey it regularly to establish the potential risks and scale of the problem, and it should be regularly monitored in order to enable informed and selective intervention, if deemed appropriate as a pre-emptive or preventative measure.

A summary is here: youtube.com/watch?v=jl5uPufCXlI

INVEST IN "TRASH SKIMMER CRAFT", particularly in the CLYDE ESTUARY to mitigate the ARROCHER "LITTER SINK"

Due to tidal rhythms a lot of waste which ends up in the Clyde eventually gets trapped at the foot of Loch Long, in Arrocher.

In Feb 2025, the BBC reported:

"About 62,000 items wash up on the beach each year, much of it from the waterways in and around Glasgow…It is estimated that 11% of the rubbish which enters the River Clyde - which flows through the city - and its tributaries is eventually washed up at Arrochar. The local residents can't clean it up fast enough. Lots of the waste is tangled in the seaweed which was once an asset to the community. It used to be collected by the bucketload to fertilise farm land, but that's no longer possible because of the pollution."

[ bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8256l20l0o ]

While we all have a responsibility not to litter, we propose greater investment in Trash Skimmer Craft to "harvest" the plastic and debris in the Clyde prior to it floating further out.