It is an inalienable fact of political life that whenever British and European political leaders gather together in a room, the Scottish fishing industry will be sold out.

Sir Keir Starmer’s trade agreement with the EU this week is the latest slap in the face to communities that have grown used to being an expendable pawn in negotiations led by politicians who struggle to maintain even the pretence that they give a damn.

The betrayal of the industry has a long and ignoble tradition, going back as far as 1964 when Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government signed the London Fisheries Convention, allowing vessels from European nations to fish within six nautical miles of the British coast.

Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss have all, in their time, been accused of caving into European demands for access to UK waters. Most recently, in 2023, Northern Ireland’s fishing industry accused Rishi Sunak of neglecting their concerns in his deal, which kept them under EU fishing rules.

No-one should, for a moment, underestimate the challenge facing the current Prime Minister, in seeking to gain any advantage from the economic bombsite that is post-Brexit Britain.

Read more by Carlos Alba

Attempting to convince those on the other side of the table that he held anything more than a big handful of nothing – following this country’s gratuitous and unprecedented act of self-immolation nine years ago – would have required a poker face of superhuman control.

For his continental interlocutors, it must have been like trying, politely, to maintain a conversation with a drunk man in a pub, prolonging the charade that his incoherent ramblings contained any........

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