Emmanuel Macron was forced to surrender at the 11th hour of his painstaking negotiations with post-Brexit Britain four years ago.
The bombshell revelation comes ahead of Keir Starmer's ‘Great EU Reset’ Summit on May 19, where the PM is expected to finalise new plans for a defence pact that would allow UK arms firms to bid for contracts under the EU's €150billion defence fund.
It's feared that the Labour leader will sell out British fishing rights after a Brussels insider told the UK Fisheries Campaign and GB News, in association with Facts4EU and CIBUK, that a four-year fishing deal is a prerequisite for any new defence pact.
As we explained previously, such a scenario would ensure EU vessels maintain access to UK waters for up to 14 years after the British people voted to leave the Brussels bloc, with Starmer facing pressure to surrender access to the UK's sovereign waters until mid-2030.
Although the crunch talks will test Starmer's mettle, an investigation by Facts4EU, shared exclusively with GB News, suggests the EU will be bluffing.
Macron's humiliating climbdown on eve of 'Brexit reset' as SHOCK graph shows EU surrender
Getty Images/Facts4EU
The evidence of this can be traced back to a tense five-day standoff between then-Brexit minister Lord Frost and Macron in late 2021 that resulted in the current UK-EU fishing deal.
At the time, Britain and France were at loggerheads, with the latter claiming the former was deliberately "holding up" the issuing of licences to French fishing boats to fish in British waters.
France threatened to cut off electric power supplying Britain and the Channel Islands via undersea cables if Britain did not budge.
In a series of Twitter posts on Sunday, 31 Oct - around 36 hours before the French unilateral ultimatum to the UK was due to expire - Clément Beaune, President Macron’s protégé and his Minister for European Affairs, accused Britain of rigging the negotiations in her favour..
He claimed that 'more than 40 per cent of French licence applications’ were being held up and that '10% of EU licence applications have not been granted', adding: 'All the missing ones are French.'
Briton then responded to these claims, exposing them as patently false.
Ahead of a crunch meeting with French ministers on Thursday 04 Nov 2021, Lord Frost announced the release of all Government data on EU fishing vessel licence applications. This information showed clearly that claims by French government ministers were wildly inaccurate.
“As there are some partial figures around, and for full transparency, we have today set out in Parliament the full & authoritative data on the state of play on fishing licences granted by the UK, Jersey, and Guernsey this year," Lord Frost said in a statement the evening before the crunch talks.
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The data released by the UK government at the time showed the numbers of applications received for EU fishing vessel licences, broken down by category and by EU country.
After analysing the figures, we can exclusively bring readers a simple comparison of the French government’s claims and the sober reality.
As the graph below shows, the claim that the UK failed to grant over 40 per cent of French licence applications proved spurious, as the reality was 3.9 per cent.
The French claim that around 10 per cent of expected EU licences have not been granted also turned out to be false, with the accurate figure being 2.1 per cent.
Furthermore, the assertion that 'all the missing licences were French' did not check out - the reality was 89.5 per cent.
The claim that the UK failed to grant over 40 per cent of French licence applications proved spurious
Facts4EU
As of Macron's original ultimatum deadline, the UK had issued licences for 1,679 EU fishing vessels – 738 to the French alone. The Jersey government had issued 162 - all to the French.
Never mentioned is Jersey's neighbour, Guernsey, also a Crown Dependency, reporting separately. Guernsey had issued 167 temporary licences to EU fishing vessels. This took the number of licences currently issued by the UK, Jersey, and Guernsey to the EU Commission to a grand total of 2,008.
Faced with these facts and no “significant move” from the UK government’s well-established position of following the rules set out in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, together with some very generous interpretations of these from the UK side, Lord Frost and Boris Johnson left him nowhere to go. He was subsequently forced to drop his demands and accept the terms of the agreement on the table.
