A L'eau C'est L'Heure - The Royal Navy and the 'Scallop Wars'

Just when you thought the August silly season couldn’t get any sillier, the Daily Mail has managed to spark an outbreak of outrage over the news that the Royal Navy’s Fishery Protection Squadron hulls were all busy doing port visits, rather than protecting British fishermen in their ongoing spat in what has been dubbed ‘the Scallop Wars’.

The situation appears to be that a group of British fishing vessels operating about 12nm off the coast of France (so potentially just inside French waters) were surrounded by a much larger group of French fishing vessels and prevented from fishing for scallops. This is due to a difference of agreements which permits British vessels to fish these waters for scallops all year round, with French vessels heavily restricted in when they can fish for scallops.

The ensuing standoff led to a furious outburst from fishermen, feeling they were unable to carry out their livelihood, and led to calls for the Royal Navy to intervene to safeguard their right to fish unimpeded. The lack of an RN presence has seen concerned articles in the papers about how UK fishermen are being left unprotected from the nasty French…

This led of course to a Daily Mail article (HERE) talking about how none of the OPVs were available (referring to them as ‘Gunboats). It also claimed HMS TYNE with a crew of 20 troops was ‘chained up’ in dock in Faslane, raising the question of whether she was being painted in fifty shades of grey and if she’d been a very bad ship indeed…

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The fundamental problem here is that this issue is really not a problem for the Royal Navy to fix. The role of the Fishery Protection Squadron is to monitor and police activity in UK waters, not sail into another nations waters and insist on upholding of agreements. At best this is a civil matter, with the French police being in the lead for determining whether a criminal action has occurred.

It is easy to demand that the UK ‘send a gunboat’ but the question has to be ‘why’? In much the same way as a commercial dispute between British and French truck drivers rarely results in demands to send in the Parachute Regiment to ‘protect our boys’, its extremely hard to understand why you’d want to send a military asset into this situation in the first place.

At best an RN vessel could sail in close proximity to the fishing vessels and report any observed criminal activity to the French authorities – something that the fishermen can already do themselves. From a practical ship handling perspective, there would be potential risks if you put the OPV on a course that threatened the safety of other vessels, or saw them fail to meet their obligations under the so-called ‘Rules of the Road’. The ships cannot intervene nor can they send boarding parties to arrest the crew of the French ships, or impound their vessels. Given this is a purely civil matter, it is difficult to see how the RN would be able to fire warning shots or threaten to shoot French ships either. This is a commercial dispute, not a WW2 convoy fighting off hordes of enemy gunboats.

So, if you send a warship to sit there alongside the group, what is the exact effect you are hoping to achieve? From a publicity perspective this has the potential to be a PR own goal of the highest order – if the French fishermen undertook aggressive action but the RN did nothing (on the grounds that there was no basis for them to intervene) then the images of British fishermen being badly treated while the RN did nothing will resonate widely.

There was a case a few years ago of two UK sailors kidnapped by Somali pirates who were transferred at sea, while the RFA crew was unable to intervene to rescue them. From an operational perspective this made perfect sense – the crew were not trained or equipped in the highly specialist role of hostage rescue, and the risk to the Chandlers life was high in the event of a miscalculation. The headlines though were damning, suggesting that the Royal Navy stood by and did nothing – even though that was precisely the right thing to do.

It is likely that any RN deployment in support of the fishermen would have a similar result – the image of RN ships standing by seemingly doing nothing would be an easy story for the media to publish as a commentary on the alleged decline of the Royal Navy and the UK.

Were this incident to have occurred in UK territorial waters, then it is entirely likely that a very different response would have happened – suddenly you can use UK capabilities and laws and take a more proactive approach to resolving the situation. There is a wide range of capabilities out there which could be used to solve this in the event of it happening at home. The OPV force is an extremely capable part of the Royal Navy, able to do a lot of challenging tasks and provide real capability to operations. But it is just one part of a much bigger maritime tapestry that is involved in policing waters around the UK, including the police, fisheries inspection vessels, border force vessels and other aerial and maritime assets.

When incidents occur outside our waters though then different rules apply. Expecting the British Government to dispatch a warship to go inside French territorial waters to ‘protect’ UK fishermen from French fishermen is neither realistic nor a sensible measure. What is better is to work at the local level to identify how to resolve the issue.

There is without doubt an ongoing issue about how to protect UK maritime interests, particularly post Brexit when many long-standing arrangements will change. This is a separate debate though to what is going on off the coast of France, which is an entirely different situation.

It is frustrating to see the good work of the Royal Navy called into question by lazy journalism which suggests that somehow the RN has failed to protect its citizenry. The Fishery Protection Squadron are some of the hardest working vessels in the RN, and are at sea for large periods of time, often in horrendous conditions helping to protect our maritime interests. They should not be begrudged the occasional visit alongside to engage in either Defence Diplomacy or helping keep the RN in the public eye. To make out that they have failed for not responding to an event that they had no reason to respond to is risible.

The way to resolve this situation is through engagement, compromise and working out a sustainable future for both British and French fishermen to maintain their livelihoods for the long term. It is not fixed by demands to dispatch warships to police commercial disputes. This is not a situation for the Royal Navy to resolve. To blame the RN, or the wider Government for failing to take action for the manner in which the French Government polices activity inside French territorial waters seems pretty desperate ways of filling column inches during a very silly season.

Plus ca change…