A lifetime fisherman, Martin Yorwarth, has written a ska shanty to protest about the plight of seaside towns and their small boats in the face of official indifference and the lack of fish to catch.
Yorwarth, from Canvey Island, wrote “Coast Town” as a call for help in the “last hour” for fishing vessels in towns along the English Channel and the North Sea coast such as Newhaven, Hastings and Southend.
In the song, with music from Kenny G and the Ska Shanty Band, Yorwarth blames government officials for giving away an unfair amount of fishing opportunities to factory ships and industrial-sized vessels, then standing by while they stripped the sea of fish.
“The fisheries mismanagement,” he says, “has been a farce.”
Faced with the big boats and corporate power, “fishing police turn away and lean on the small boats – day after day after day.”
He has seen the plight of the inshore fleet affect fishermen’s health and their families, and says it is now stretching to their communities. He says in the song: “let’s make sure we have our say.”
Martin Yorwarth, who was filmed on the beach owned by the Hastings Fishermen’s Protection Society, said: “This song was written for the forgotten people who have already been made ill or driven out of business by decades of unfair and ecologically destructive policies. It is a requiem for the inshore fleet and the coastal communities that have suffered at the hands of our political class.”
Mr Yorwarth was one of many inshore fishermen involved in London protests about the unfair allocation of quota – only 4 per cent of which goes to the inshore fleet – and sat alongside conservationists from Blue Marine Foundation in the High Court earlier this year to challenge the 2020 Fisheries Act, a challenge that failed to get leave to go to the Court of Appeal.
Charles Clover, co-founder of Blue Marine and one of the producers of the shanty video, said: “We are seeing overwhelming evidence this autumn that bears out what Martin sings about. The mackerel, the largest stock the industry has left to depend on, is now in serious decline. The Northern shelf cod is overfished and scientists are calling for a zero catch for this and many other species because of years of mismanagement.
“The Fisheries Act – passed by the last government – has allowed the decline of our inshore waters to continue every year since it was passed in 2020. Yet the reality is that it is within the power of ministers to put a stop to overfishing right now.
“The government is negotiating quotas with the EU as we speak. Ministers could look beyond the political and economic short-termism that has collapsed fish stocks over the past decade and caused a steep decline in employment in small scale fishing communities. Ministers need to prioritise the long-term health of fish stocks – without which there will be no fishing industry.”
You can see ITV East Anglia’s interview with Charles Clover here:
You can see the full music video that aired on ITV here:
