Brexit: Oil, fish and bargaining chips
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How is the Scottish city of Aberdeen coping with the UK's imminent exit from the EU? It is home to the country's oil and gas industry, as well as some 5,000 fisherman.
Katie Prescott speaks to local businesspeople in both industries, who are increasingly anxious at the complete lack of certainty about what will happen when the UK does eventually leave - albeit that the date of departure has now been postponed by a few more weeks beyond 29 March.
How will European fishing quotas and access to British waters be decided post Brexit? And what will happen to Aberdeen's oil production, particularly as the flow of fossil fuels from under the North Sea begins to run dry? Aberdeen is the most vulnerable city in the UK to Brexit, according to Andrew Carter of research group, the Centre for Cities.
Producer: Sarah Treanor
(Picture: Fish at the Aberdeen fish market; Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a special edition of Business Daily coming from the Scottish city of Aberdeen. |
| 0:08.0 | The so-called Granite City on the North Sea coast was built on the fishing industry but became rich from oil and gas. |
| 0:15.0 | With a question mark now over when the UK is due to leave the European Union and as yet with no deal in place, is this economy robust |
| 0:22.8 | enough to sail a steady course through these choppy waters? |
| 0:26.3 | One thing that is really obvious is that we need to share the management of our fish stocks. |
| 0:31.4 | Fish don't see the borders between countries. You could say, well, they were born in France. |
| 0:36.8 | They're French. |
| 0:43.0 | Well, you could say they grew up in the UK and they're British, but actually they're European fish. |
| 0:48.5 | I think people, the general consensus on the market, I think people are just absolutely fed up to the back to the bit. |
| 0:53.4 | And if we conducted our business, the way they're conducting themselves, none of us would be in business. |
| 0:59.9 | That's all in Business Daily, with me, Katie Prescott, in Aberdeen on the BBC's World Service. |
| 1:11.4 | It's impossible to spend time in this part of Scotland and miss the fishing vessels that line the coast. |
| 1:14.5 | About 5,000 fishermen, and they are mainly men, are employed on the boats. |
| 1:19.0 | But this industry creates many more jobs along the supply chain. |
| 1:24.7 | Since the UK started its relationship with the European Union, the introduction of the common fisheries policy has loomed large over this small coastal community. |
| 1:34.0 | It was a way of divvying up the fish stocks between different countries and introduced quotas for how much fish could be taken from the waters and of what type. |
| 1:42.7 | It had conservation benefits, but also unintended consequences. |
| 1:47.1 | It's very hard to choose what you take out of the water. Fish had to be thrown back into the sea, |
| 1:52.5 | while some people lost their livelihoods when they had to stop fishing in case they went over their |
| 1:57.3 | quota. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people working here with fish |
| 2:01.9 | can't wait to get out of the EU, a contrast to the way the rest of Scotland voted. |
| 2:08.2 | More fish than anywhere else in the UK is landed here at Peterhead Port, and early each morning, |
... |
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