'We were meant to be out of the old deal next year but Starmer has sold us down the river'

SIR Keir Starmer has been slammed for “selling out” British fisherman with a dismal catch of the day giving EU trawlers access to UK waters for another 12 years.

- By Richard Ashmore

In London on Monday the PM agreed to allow European vessels to operate around the UK coast until 2038.

There was no improvement on the 2020 Brexit deal which saw UK fishermen handed just 25% of EU quotas around these islands, and London will still dish out annual quotas for catches with Brussels and Norway.

Sir Keir has said the deal is “protecting our access, rights and fishing areas with no increase in the amount that EU vessels can catch in British waters”.

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the agreement meant “nobody has lost more than the fishermen”, and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage added it would be “the end of the fishing industry”.

The devastation by Westminster wrangling with Eurocrats can perhaps be seen nowhere as starkly as in Fleetwood, Lancashire, where just two trawlers remain from a once mighty armada of around 120 vessels in the 1960s.

A third of the population, 11,000 people, were once employed directly, or indirectly, by the industry. The town was hit hard by the so-called Cod Wars in the 1970s, which saw the UK government back down to Iceland over fishing rights.