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An Aberdeen fish processor has said fishermen and merchants alike must hold up their hands and plead guilty to dealing in over-quota fish and precipitating the stocks crisis.
And Sandy law, proprietor of S Law, said now is the time to change practices and take technical measures even further before the Commission has no option but to close the North Sea.
Mr Law, who emphasised he was speaking for himself and not merchant's association AFCAMA, said that he was unrepentant about remarks he made backing Aberdeen Central MP Frank Doran who told a Commons fisheries debate that fishermen flouted net rules by towing square mesh trawls upside down and other tricks.
Fishermen's spokesmen condemned the claims as "disgraceful" and "absurd", but Mr Law was adamant that the revelation was itself made by a Peterhead skipper, and since publication of Mr Law's backing for the Aberdeen MP, more skippers had phoned and revealed further sharp practices.
In addition to towing trawls upside down, fishermen were putting tyres in cod-ends to increase tension and putting small mesh liners inside cod ends.
He said: "The majority of the merchants back me up. We are all talking about the problem that we have now and this has brought it to the fore, at least with the merchants.
"We cannot keep pointing the finger and saying everyone is wrong but us. The fishermen are as much to blame as ourselves. They have been landing black fish and we have been buying it. No one can say we are snow white. We are not. We have all got a bit of blackness to us and it's only ourselves that can sort it out."
He added that politicians were also culpable, having turned their backs on scientific advice for "15 years or more".
Mr Law said that the industry could sustain at the very most a 20 to 30 per cent cut, but this would need to be backed by a days-at-sea programme and other measures like curbs on industrial fishing, landing rounders and a possible ban of pair trawling.
Scottish White Fish Producers Association vice-chairman George Geddes condemned the attack on fishermen and said that it was scarcely credible that Mr Doran was an MP for North East Scotland.
"The last thing the industry needs just now is putting cheap shots across one another. This made me very angry," he said.
"Because these people are not involved in the catching sector they do not realise how ridiculous some of their statements are. If we had a square mesh panel in the bottom of the net, we would not be catching many prawns, the prawns would fall out.”
"This is all hearsay stuff that they think is happening. They really want to get their own house in order before they start criticising other people. The rest of the claims are absolute nonsense.”
"It is really sad that it has happened at this time because our whole industry, including them, is in crisis. We do not need this. If we were cheating then we would have caught our allocation of haddocks and whiting. We have not because we realise we have got to conserve these stocks."
Mr Geddes added that it was very frustrating and disheartening after the united front that had been shown by a delegation of processors and fishermen who had briefed MPs prior to the fisheries debate.
He also said that Mr Doran and fellow Aberdeen MP Anne Begg had "let down the North East of Scotland badly," in the debate, and said that Mr Doran's comments were "unhelpful and untruthful".
He added: "You would not think they are MPs in Aberdeen. You would think that they are MPs in the south of England somewhere. But there will be a general election soon and hopefully people will remember these things."
By Peter Johnson
FIS Europe
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