To have served a side of smoked salmon at Christmas 30 years ago, you had to be wealthy. Cod, by contrast, was barely good enough to give the cat. Nowadays, the positions of the fish are almost exactly reversed. Salmon is piled high in the supermarket and cod is an expensive treat. Next year, when European Union cod quotas are cut by 45 per cent, it will be a rarer luxury still.

The reasons for the change are straightforward. While salmon has been successfully farmed, cod has been hunted to near extinction. The cod brought ashore at East Coast fishing ports are shadows of their ancestors: though cod mature at the age of four years, most are now scooped at two years old.

The trawlers which catch them have come to treat the North Sea as Santa Claus treats his sack: no matter how much they extract from it, they still believe that there will always be more within.

To anyone who is not emotionally involved in the fishing industry, the problem — and its solution — are obvious. North Sea cod are facing extinction. Either we stop fishing them temporarily in order to allow their numbers to recover, or there will soon be no more fish left. The same choice faced Canadian fishermen in the late 1980s when scientists warned them that cod stocks were close to collapse Unfortunately, they carried on fishing and, as if in some biblical parable, cod stocks did collapse.

It is a tragedy that our fishermen refuse to accept similar evidence in the North Sea. It is even more unfortunate that the EU has rejected a ban on cod fishing and instead imposed the fudge of a 45 per cent cut in quotas. All that will ensure is that the cod fishing industry suffers a lingering death rather than a quick one. Tony Blair, a man who is normally keen to sing the praises of science and scientists, has done himself no favours by describing the scientific advice as “unacceptable”. The scientists giving the advice are not from some vegan pressure group but from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), a respected body of 1,600 marine experts who have analysed in great detail the data supplied to them by the Scottish Executive’s Fisheries Research Service.

The ICES says that there are now between 30,000 and 40,000 tonnes of spawning cod in the North Sea. The absolute minimum number required to secure long-term survival of the species at the current level of fishing is 70,000 tonnes. To refuse to act on this evidence is astonishing hypocrisy on the part of Britain and the EU.

Whenever there is the slightest suggestion that a species is threatened in another part of the world, European countries lose no time in supporting international bans. We vigorously supported the prohibition of ivory trading in 1989 and have voted to maintain it ever since — even though elephant numbers are booming and a cull may soon be necessary in parts of southern Africa. We have put huge pressure on Third World countries not to exploit their resources of tropical hardwoods. Our regard for the sanctity of endangered species appears to stand in proportion to the distance those species live from our shores.

A responsible Government would not damn the scientific evidence but concentrate on preparing communities for a life after fishing. Fishermen need help to build new livelihoods, not a vainglorious stand against the world’s boffins. Proud men used to hard manual work are not easily persuaded of the merits of a job in a microchip factory or a call centre, but it is essential that preparations are made for new employment in order to avoid the unrest which accompanied the decline of coalmining.

There is a future for the fish industry, but not in the exploitative manner of the past 50 years. If we wish to carry on eating cod in the quantities we have been doing, we will have to farm it, with perhaps a smaller, upmarket industry in wild fish. The Norwegians are investing heavily in research into cod farming, and are some way towards making farmed cod more common in Norway than wild cod. Why aren’t we following their example?

In the meantime, there are still wild fishing grounds elsewhere in the world, to which British fishermen could be commuting. Our fishermen are widely admired for the hard and dangerous work they do, but when it comes to searching for work opportunities they are not as intrepid as they might be.

Spanish fishermen are prepared to travel round the world for fish: nearly half the fish caught under licence in the Falklands are caught by Spanish vessels. Our fishermen could display similar enterprise. In our fishing ports, by contrast, an attitude prevails of “my father worked the Dogger Bank and his father before him, so I will, too”.

The sight of the trawler heading off from Fraserburgh in the twilight is a romantic sight. But to carry on fishing in the North Sea at this time is not romantic. It is plain stupid.

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