By Ben Kerrigan-
The UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has warned France it has 48 hours to back down on threats made in the row over fishing licences or Britain will begin dispute talks set out in the Brexit deal.
French officials have vowed to bar UK fishing boats from some ports and tighten customs checks on lorries entering the country unless more licences are granted for their small boats to fish in Britain’s waters.
Truss suggested the French president, Emmanuel Macron, may be making “unreasonable threats” because he has a difficult election looming.
Almost 1,700 EU vessels have been licensed to fish in UK waters, equating to 98% of EU applications for fishing licences, the UK government says, but this figure is disputed in Paris.
Truss accused the French of makinmg completely unreasonable threats, including to the Channel Islands and to our fishing industry and they need to withdraw those threats.”
Truss said if the French did not withdraw the threats, the UK government would use “the mechanisms of our trade agreement with the EU to take action”, which “could lead to taking direct action in trade”.
“The French have behaved unfairly. It’s not within the terms of the trade deal,” she added. “And if someone behaves unfairly in a trade deal you’re entitled to take action against them and seek some compensatory measures and that is what we will do if the French don’t back down.”
She added: “[The French must] stop threatening UK fishing vessels, stop threatening the Channel ports, and accept that we are entirely within our rights to allocate the fishing licences in line with the trade agreement, as we have done.”
She said she would “absolutely” take legal action in the coming days if France did not back down, saying: “This issue needs to be resolved in the next 48 hours.”
Pierre-Henri Dumont, a French politician for Les Républicains party, said France simply wanted the UK to “fulfil its commitments that were made during the post-Brexit treaty”.
He said he thought “harder negotiations” may need to be opened up with the British side.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What we are asking is just for the British government to fulfil and keep its promises that were made by signing this post-Brexit agreement.
“We’re not asking any more. We’re not asking for something that was not into this treaty. We’re just asking for the British government to fulfil and to keep its signature. That’s it.”