The nation's books

Would farmers and fishermen be better off?

Q: Would farmers and fishermen be better off?

Rural Scotland has been promised transformation twice - and audited, the promises look thin: a fishing 'uplift' worth under 10% more catch, then EU access to Scottish waters extended to 2038 in a deal with no Scottish signature; farm funding stripped of its ring-fence and crofts caught by a tax designed elsewhere. This page audits both ledgers - including Scotland's own.

The short answer

Nowhere in Scotland was promised more from Brexit than the farms and the fishing ports, and nowhere was promised louder than the north-east. Leaving the Common Fisheries Policy was to bring a "sea of opportunity"; leaving the Common Agricultural Policy would free farming from Brussels. Two governments of two parties have now held the pen since, so the promises can be audited against delivery.

The audit is not kind. Fishing got a fraction of the promised uplift, then watched access to Scottish waters be extended to 2038 as the price of somebody else's deal. Farming got a tax change designed without its tenancies and crofts in mind, and lost the ring-fence that protected its budget. This page sets out that record, owns the Scottish Government's own failures alongside it, and takes on directly the hardest question in the independence debate for coastal Scotland: what about the CFP?

The fishing audit: promises against papers

Start with what was signed, not what was said. The 2020 Trade and Cooperation Agreement's headline was "a 25% uplift" - but read the small print: 25% of the value of the EU catch in UK waters, phased over five and a half years. That converts to less than a 10% increase in the UK's actual catch, concentrated in big offshore stocks like mackerel and North Sea herring; quota for the stocks inshore boats depend on rose by almost nothing, and EU vessels kept access to the 6-12 mile zone (House of Commons Library; UK in a Changing Europe; Maritime Studies). The industry called it a betrayal at the time. It turned out to be the better of the two deals.

In May 2025 the UK-EU "reset" extended full reciprocal access to UK waters for twelve more years, to June 2038 - not as a fishing policy, but as the price of a wider package on trade and defence (The Conversation). The Scottish Fishermen's Federation called it "a horror show for Scottish fishermen, far worse than Boris Johnson's botched Brexit agreement", made "on the backs of our fishermen and coastal communities... at the last minute in order to secure other objectives" (The Fishing Daily). The Scottish Pelagic Fishermen's Association: "an utter betrayal of the promises made to us on Brexit... it beggars belief that this has been extended to 12 years, which ties the hands of future UK governments" (The Fishing Daily).

Note the pattern, because it is the whole point of this page. Twice in five years, under both parties, access to Scottish waters was the coin that paid for something else - financial services and sovereignty theatre in 2020, defence and trade in 2025. Both times the decision was rational for the government making it: fishing is a small industry in the UK's books, and a large one only in places with few Westminster seats. Neither deal carried a Scottish signature, and no future UK government - the Pelagic Association saw this precisely - is any less free to do it again.

Update [14 July 2026]: A newer and smaller episode is circulating as "Scotland got none of the UK's tuna quota", and it deserves precision, because the outcome is true and the mechanism is not what the headline implies. Bluefin tuna have returned to UK waters, and the UK's quota rises to 230 tonnes a year for 2026 to 2028. Thirty vessels were authorised for the 2026 commercial fishery: twenty-nine from England, one from Jersey, none from Scotland or Wales (outcome summary from the Marine Management Organisation, the body that ran the UK-wide process). The organisation's own breakdown shows how. Of 155 applications, just two were Scottish, and both failed the published pass criteria - as did all ten Welsh applications - before the final thirty were drawn by random ballot from the 66 that passed, with identifying details, including location, removed before assessment. One line in the document does belong on this page's ledger, though, and on both sides of it: every UK fisheries administration was invited to help assess applications, and only England and Jersey took a seat. The deeper pattern is structural rather than sinister. The fishery was developed through trials in the South West, its rules (small boats, day trips, rod and line) fit that coast's conditions, and the separate recreational tuna fishery - worth £2.9m in Defra's own evaluation - runs in English waters under an English permit scheme, while Scotland, which holds the devolved power to open its own, has not. A UK asset won at the Brexit negotiations is growing an industry around the coastline of one nation - mostly by default rather than by design, with the default set by where the pipeline started and by who turns up.

The farming audit

Farming's ledger is quieter but runs the same way. The October 2024 Budget capped Agricultural Property Relief: inherited farm assets above £1 million face 20% inheritance tax from April 2026. Whatever its merits for lowland English estates, the policy was designed without Scotland's structure in mind - a quarter of Scottish farms are tenanted, with no provision for them, and some 15,000 crofts are caught, points made across parties in the Scottish Parliament (official report, 13 November 2024). NFU Scotland notes farmers are being asked to do more on a support budget with half the buying power it had a decade ago.

The same Budget ended something less noticed and more structural: the ring-fence around agricultural funding. Support that had been guaranteed separately - as the post-Brexit replacement for CAP money, per the Bew Review's recommendation - was folded into the block grant, where it now competes with health, education and everything else (The Scottish Farmer; Farmers Weekly). Readers of our direct-spending page will recognise the move: the sums Scotland's rural economy plans around are sized in London, by a formula built for other purposes, changeable in a single Budget speech.

Scotland's own ledger

This site audits both governments or it audits nothing. The Scottish Government's proposal to close at least 10% of Scotland's seas to fishing as Highly Protected Marine Areas enraged the same coastal communities Westminster's deals had already burned - a folk band's protest song compared it to the Clearances - and it was dropped in 2023 after a consultation that split the country (STV News; Fishing News). Agriculture is devolved, and Scottish farmers have their own list of frustrations with the pace and clarity of Scottish farm policy. Nothing about independence makes governments in Edinburgh wise.

What it changes is who they answer to. The HPMA plan died precisely because the communities affected could reach the government proposing it - protest worked, and ministers accountable to coastal voters retreated. The 2025 waters deal was signed over identical fury, and stands. That contrast - not any claim of Scottish governmental virtue - is the argument.

The hardest question on this page

An independent Scotland that joined the EU would join the Common Fisheries Policy. This site won't soft-pedal that: the CFP is the system Scottish fishermen most wanted out of, and "independence in Europe" puts it back on the table. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Three things are honestly true at once. First, this is exactly why the EU-or-EFTA choice - set out on our EU page - is a real decision for an independent Scotland, not a formality: Norway, Iceland and the Faroes run their own waters and sell into the single market from EFTA and bilateral positions, and coastal Scotland would carry real weight in that debate. Second, even inside the EU, Scotland would sit at the table as a member state - with a vote, a veto over accession terms, and fisheries ministers answerable to Peterhead and Fraserburgh rather than to a UK negotiation in which fishing is small change. Third, the status quo offers neither: in 2025 access to Scottish waters was signed away for twelve years without any Scottish government, of any party, holding a pen. The CFP question is hard. The current arrangement answers it worst of all: EU boats in Scottish waters, on terms set by others, with no Scottish seat anywhere.

So what's the real question?

Not whether Brexit's rural promises were kept - the industry's own federations have answered that in words this page could not improve on.

The real question is the standing one, and for farming and fishing it has teeth. These industries are marginal to the UK's economy and central to Scotland's coastal and rural life - which means that in London they will always be tradeable, and in Edinburgh they never could be. Independence doesn't guarantee farmers and fishermen get their way; the HPMA row shows Scottish governments will sometimes propose things they hate. It guarantees something narrower and more valuable: that whoever trades their interests has to face them afterwards.

Take it with you

Facts for sharing - each button copies the line, with its source and a link back to this page.

'A horror show for Scottish fishermen, far worse than Boris Johnson's botched Brexit agreement' - the Scottish Fishermen's Federation on the 2025 UK-EU deal extending EU access to Scottish waters for twelve years (The Fishing Daily)
The Brexit fishing 'uplift' was 25% of the value of the EU catch in UK waters - under 10% more actual catch, concentrated offshore, with near-nothing for inshore boats (House of Commons Library)
In October 2024 the Treasury ended ring-fenced farm funding: Scottish agriculture now competes with health and education inside a block grant sized in London (The Scottish Farmer; Farmers Weekly)
Twice in five years - 2020 and 2025 - access to Scottish waters was traded in London to pay for other objectives. Neither deal carried a Scottish signature