The nightmare future in store for the world’s oceans has already arrived on the Firth of Clyde, where my wife and I spent every family holiday in the 1990s when our children were small. Back in the 1960s when I was a child, two angling festivals were held every year on the Isle of Arran. Today they are a distant memory: the bountiful stocks of herring, cod, haddock, saithe, hake, skate and shark have all collapsed.

In the absence of fish there is an explosion of langoustines – or scampi – which are frozen in batter for British supermarket shelves or fetch high prices when transported live to the Continent. But under the current regime, the cod, haddock and saithe will never recover: every trawler catching scampi in the Clyde throws away 9lb of “by-catch” – juvenile fish and sea creatures – for every 1lb of scampi caught.

Now even scampi is threatened. Its numbers are suffering from smoking crab disease and no-one knows now how long the langoustine population can hold out against disease. Yet if we do not stop “fishing down the food chain”, the inevitable outcome is that we will be left with only jellyfish and plankton.

The Scottish government sides relentlessly with the fishermen and against the spirited individuals and groups who want to create marine reserves and “no-take” zones that might begin to restore a healthy ecosystem.

[In fact the undue power of commercial interests in fisheries management decision making seems to have given them a blasé attitude to the need of other fishing interests - one of their leaders allegedly said :

" My members do not want to see the regeneration of whitefish stocks in the Clyde, because they eat the shellfish nymphs, and my members rely on the nephrops for their livelihood "

Selfish parochial attitudes like this do nothing to engender any confidence in the future of inshore fisheries management when it is solely under the control of the mobile fishing commercial fishing sector - SSACN. ]

It is a scandal that Europe’s citizens have no right to insist that its ministers and officials are bound to observe its laws. All it would take to rectify this is for Britain and other European nations to support the right of environmental groups to challenge the implementation of fishing policy in the European Court of Justice. Only then will our continent’s seas emerge from the Dark Ages.

The End of the Line, a film based on Charles Clover’s book, has its national premiere at 50 cinemas tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Clyde needs sustainable strategy
2. Deregulate and decline in the Clyde
3. North Sea whiting stock mystery