Dear God man.

Do you hear yourself. Do you have any idea of the complexities? I suspect not.

I worked in the EU parliament. I understand the EU which is why I voted to leave it. The EU is constrained by its treaties. There is a limit to what it can offer without treaty change. EFTA/EEA is probably the best of them. No FTA offers what the EEA does. But then it demands something in return.

If you cracked open an EU FTA, which I doubt that you have, you will find many of the same things in it that are in the EEA agreement. The EEA is simply an FTA itself. It is just the most comprehensive one ever devised

I don't deny that there may be grounds to use stop & search and like good little Tories we all applaud.....while it is happening to someone else.

Then one day the police begin to abuse these powers to bypass other protections elsewhere, "I believed him to 'ave a laser pen about 'is person, my Lud."

How often did public authorities abuse RIPA? Every day! When it was introduced it was all about terrorism. Before you know it, it is about school catchment areas and is being utilised by people from the town hall, too dim to be able to see the fundamental problem with what they were doing.

I am rarely in favour of giving the police more powers. They constantly seek them and blackmail ministers into handing them over...."Well Home Secretary, the readers of the Mail aren't going to take to it kindly, if A happens because you didn't give the police the power to do B"

Power granted and suddenly the police are throwing elderly Jewish hecklers out of the Labour party conference. You get the picture, I'm sure?

I suspect that ConHome may not have published it had it done as you suggest

Nothing Labour do surprises me

Syboic access?

No!
Access by agreement with the UK and with UK waters under control of the Ministry of Ag Fish and Food who have complete autonomy over what is caught.

I suspect that the what the EU really want is a return to the London Agreement of 1964.

EU vessels have access to Norwegian and Icelandic waters by agreement with those countries. As we no longer have the vessels to fish the recovered waters, it might make sense to, negotiate some access.....but not a situation where the EU tells us how much of our own fish we can catch, whilst allowing other EU countries to catch more than we can.

You need to remember here, that the CFP was only invented during the UK access negotiations, by the French, because the countries proposing to join with us, Ireland, Denmark and Norway also had huge fishing waters and the French wanted unfettered access to them. The Norwegians took one look at the CFP and declined to join.

Heath then lied to parliament, or that slender 8 vote margin would have dissolved like snow on a summers day. The EU also wanted the UK's oil fields but as Heath said in reply, "No....the people would never stand for it"

Fishing is an extremely emotive subject. Many of you are too young to even remember our trawlers being pulled from the water and having their hulls ruptured so as to make way for Spanish and Portuguese vessels. Our fishing industry was decimated by the common fisheries policy, though we would have lost vessels anyway as stocks were depleting due to overfishing.

We had also lost access to the deep water fishing areas of Iceland, with the 200 mile or median line limit coming into force. That did for the huge fleets at Grimsby Hull and Fleetwood but the CFP made matters worse still.

One problem that nobody has yet addressed is that we don't have a fishing policy and I don't suppose work has even started on drawing one up.....do we have anyone with the knowledge to do so?

It really isn't as simple as people think. It could be like Mugabe handing white farms over to black farmers who don't know what to do with them.....result...famine

You moderates......I don't know.

Your suggestion about sinking vessels is complete idiocy, Sir.

There is no doubt that many of those who get onto the party board DO NOT represent the members in any way. I have known many of them and they very quickly get taken hostage and simply become the party's apologists to the members.

What they are really interested in are the gongs they can collect if they don't rock the boat.

The candidates department manipulates candidate selection so as to get its preferred candidates into safe seats. Few association chairmen have the balls to tell them where to get off.....I have been one of the few that did and the candidate we eventually selected is now an MP. She wouldn't have been had I not stood my ground against that arrogant joker Gareth Fox

The problem with this selection process....because that is what it is....is that most of the people selected and I have known many, quickly begin to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

The professional party and the parliamentary mob on the board appear to think that they are more important than the people representing the members.

Who do we have representing the members? Semple, the President and three vice presidents. How many are there from the elected party? The PM, that idiot McLaughlin, an MEP, a number of MPs....certainly more than five anyway.

The members ARE the Conservative party but you wouldn't believe it.....they don't. They think THEY are the Conservative party.

I wouldn't trust any of them to do the right thing. Self-obsessed bunch if ever there was, although there have been one or two good ones....Steve Bell springs to mind

I would imagine his say amounts to a veto. But of course Rob Semple never does anything which isn't strictly in Rob Semple's interests.