The EU has explicitly linked the City of London’s future market access to Britain giving ground on fish. Ireland’s prime minister Leo Varadkar told the BBC on Monday that “you may have to make concessions in areas like fishing in order to get concessions from us in areas like financial services.
EU diplomats fear that a post-Brexit negotiation covering everything from trade in goods to financial services — which accounted for 6.9 per cent of UK gross domestic product in 2018 — could become snarled up on fish. It is a sector that employs fewer than 180,000 people throughout the bloc but is the economic lifeblood of coastal communities, giving the industry added political leverage.
https://www.ft.com/content/96ebfb1a-3ea6-11ea-a01a-bae547046735