Daniel Hannan (ECR). – Mr President, economists are familiar with what they call spontaneous order, the way in which structures will form without supervision from above. It is a counterintuitive, difficult prospect. You would think that planning something would be much better than letting it evolve higgledy—piggledy, but it works. It is why the Cold War did not go the other way, and it is certainly true in the field of fisheries.

The European Union has an extremely top—down, controlled approach to fisheries. Stocks are treated as a common resource, and defined as such in the Treaty, to which all Member States have equal access. This is very different from the policies of Iceland or New Zealand or the Falkland Islands where skippers are incentivised to take ownership of quota and where effectively the system is privatised. We can see which one has led to flourishing fish stocks and which one has led to a collapse. Not for the first time we are labouring under the fallacy that the more we intervene, the more good we do, when in fact we have half a century of evidence to the contrary.