Eusebio Val
05/09/2021 12:01 PM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 05/09/2021 12:01
Two hundred years after the death of Napoleon, who ended his days as a prisoner of the British on the island of Saint Helena, the United Kingdom and France clash again.
Another island,
Jersey
, much closer to both countries, is the protagonist.
This Thursday, off its coast,
the Royal Navy and the French Navy deployed two units each
, as a preventive measure, while some fifty French fishing boats protested the difficulties they put to fish.
The Battle of Jersey is a sequel to Brexit.
French fishermen complain that the authorities of that island provide them with licenses in a dropper (41 permits out of 344 requests) and that this situation will lead them to ruin.
For generations they have been fishing in the rich fishing grounds of the largest of the Channel Islands, which is only 22 kilometers off the French coast.
French fishing boats, this Friday, off the port of St. Helier, on the island of Jersey.
Photo: DPA
Hostile dialogue
The protest failed to soften those responsible for Jersey.
The interview with a minister of the island did not bear the desired results.
The French fishermen chose to withdraw from the port of Saint-Hélier, the capital of Jersey.
It will have to be the government of Paris and the European Commission itself who negotiate with London.
A spokesman for the French Navy indicated that the dispatch of two patrol boats was a mere precautionary maneuver, that they had no weapons on board and that they approached Jersey to protect the fishermen and rescue them in the event that one of them fell into the water. .
The reasons put forward by the Royal Navy were similar.
This tone is required between allied countries in NATO.
French fishermen, in one of the boats protesting in the English Channel against the restrictions imposed by Great Britain.
Photo: AFP
Voltage escalation
The bilateral dispute had turned sour in recent days.
France, outraged by British poverty,
threatened harsh retaliatory measures
, such as the total or partial cut-off of the electricity supply through a submarine cable that carries energy to the island from the French coast.
The submerged cable carries 90,000 volts and is 34 kilometers long.
95% of the electricity consumed in Jersey depends on this source of supply.
The remaining 5% comes from diesel generators.
The French Minister of Fisheries, Annick Girardin, justified possible retaliation measures in the United Kingdom's exit agreements from the European Union.
Girardin hoped that it does not have to go to this extreme, that the British reconsider and honor "the good neighborly relations that France has maintained with Jersey for more than 150 years."
The British position
On the other side of the English Channel things look different.
Conservative MP David Jones told
The Daily Telegraph
that the French simply want to make money by making threats, "and this is not the way a democratic country should behave in the 21st century."
One of eight Jersey senators, Ian Gorst, was optimistic that he will find a compromise.
According to him, the problem is bureaucratic, since many French fishermen still have not presented the correct documentation to prove that they have been fishing in these waters for years.
Fishing rights hindered until the last moment a final agreement on Brexit before last Christmas.
In the end there were assignments by both parties.
French fishermen were unhappy
because they lost well-established rights.
The islands, "dependent on the Crown"
Jersey's peculiar legal status - as well as Gernsey (neighboring the former) and the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea - complicates things a bit.
Give the British excuses to delay decisions.
These islands
are not formally part of the United Kingdom, although they are strongly linked to it
by culture, economy, language, currency and security.
French fishing boats, off the coast of Jersey, this Thursday.
Photo: AP
They are "dependencies of the Crown" and enjoy
autonomy
.
This allows them to have a very advantageous tax system, which has developed a hypertrophied financial sector.
Jersey depends on the sovereigns of England, in its current status, since 1204, more than eight centuries ago.
Everything had started with the Norman invasion of 1066 - the last suffered by England - in which William the Conqueror starred.
The duchy of Normandy and the kingdom of England were under a single crown.
But almost a century and a half later, King John of England lost all the Norman territories to Philip II of France, except for the Channel Islands.
That exception has survived for more than eight hundred years.
The problem is that history, like a boomerang, always comes back, even if it is in the form of a passionate lawsuit for the right to fish.
Paris. La Vanguardia, special
CB
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