19 January 2024
There always seem to be some in academia and charity sector who find that they can make a good living pulling in grants and donations by attacking fishermen. Perhaps it is because a working class industry, largely composed of small businesses, doesn’t have the money or the connections to play them at their own game. Whatever the reason, a newspaper is again trotting out discredited claims about the carbon emissions of fishing fleets and a handful of academics and NGOs are pretending that fuel duty rates are subsidies.
Let’s be clear: there are many different rates of tax on fuel and they vary according to the type of fuel and its user. That is not the same thing as a subsidy.
Charities don’t pay tax on most of their profits and get a huge discount on their business rates. Is that a subsidy? How about the £4.55 billion that the UK’s Universities were given from the public purse last year?
It’s not as though fishermen don’t already pay plenty: they pay for their licences; they pay for vessel inspections; they pay for medical certificates and mandatory training courses – and much more besides. These ivory tower commentators would like fishermen to pay even more tax. By the same logic, perhaps they would like farmers to be taxed more for fuel as well. Then when no one in Britain can afford to produce our food any more, we can just import it all. I wonder what that will do for the nation’s carbon footprint?
Or maybe we should give up on food altogether and just eat grant applications?