French pay-off ends fishermen's port blockade

The Channel blockade by French trawlers dissolved yesterday, just in time to avert ugly scenes between angry British tourists and French fishermen at the Channel Tunnel entrance near Calais.

The Channel blockade by French trawlers dissolved yesterday, just in time to avert ugly scenes between angry British tourists and French fishermen at the Channel Tunnel entrance near Calais.

Scuffles and shouting matches - often led by British women - broke out during a two-hour partial blockade of the tunnelcar terminal, imposed by a score of implacable fishermen from Boulogne.

"This has nothing to do with us," the equally determined British women shouted. "Leave us alone. We have old people here, sick people, pregnant women." The fishermen from Boulogne - armed with half a dozen vans, a set of crash barriers and complete police indifference - stood their ground. Twenty cars were allowed to proceed on to the Folkestone-bound shuttles every 15 minutes. Everyone else, pregnant or not, had to wait for the news from Paris.

Just when it looked as though more clashes might develop, the news from Paris arrived. The French government had - as everyone knew it would - bought its way out of trouble. The fishermen had been given most of what they wanted: subsidies in the form of tax breaks and reduced harbour charges to compensate for the doubling of the price of marine fuel in the past year.

The Boulogne fishermen lifted their tunnel barrier immediately. Within an hour, the delay before cars could board a tunnel shuttle was just 10 minutes, although much longer for trucks. Elsewhere, the floating barricades imposed around the French coast on Tuesday night were lifted piecemeal, mostly according to the mood of the local fishermen.

By last night, most of the French ports were open again but ferry traffic to and from England and Ireland remained heavily disrupted.

On the English side of the Channel it was some hours before police could clear the backlog of lorries, and traffic jams continued last night. Huge queues of lorries had built up outside Dover and at the ports hit by the dispute - Calais, Cherbourg, Dunkirk, Le Havre and St Malo.

Ferry companies put on extra services to French and Belgian ports unaffected by the dispute.

Channel Tunnel shuttle train services between Calais and Folkestone were running but passengers had trouble getting through the protesters to reach the trains. There were unconfirmed reports that a British woman suffered a suspected miscarriage and was taken to a French hospital after she was stranded in Calais by the blockade. She collapsed at 8pm on Wednesday in the Sea France terminal.

Passengers on board one P&O ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth spent the whole of Wednesday night in the French port's outer harbour after the ship was surrounded by trawlers. But since the Channel Tunnel was never fully closed, most British tourists in the Calais area got home on Wednesday with only a few hours' delay, while some took a diversion through Belgium.

Motorists who had planned to cross from St Malo or Cherbourg were delayed for at least a day.

The disruption to freight traffic was more serious and could last into the weekend.

By now there is almost a script for such disputes, a kind of ritual theatre.

The French protesters - lorry drivers, fishermen or seamen - block the Channel crossings. There is extreme fury and an outbreak of Francophobia in Britain. The French press and public treat the affair with indifference, as they would an outbreak of bad weather. The French government gives way.

Everyone on the British side of the Channel says that the French must never be allowed to get away with it again, as the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, said yesterday. But everyone knows they will.

The action of the fishermen was the more infuriating because it was certain from the beginning of the week that the government would pay them.

The European Union may still have something to say about the legality of the new subsidies, which take the form of temporary reductions in social security charges and harbour dues.

If Brussels intervenes, the whole dispute might start again.

The rise in oil prices has affected French fishermen in two ways. The weakness of the euro has accentuated the oil price rise in France. French fishermen are already excused tax on marine fuel. The tax-free price paid by fishing boat owners has thus risen from 12 pence a litre to 22 pence a litre in the past year.

The fishermen, already suffering like all EU fishermen from reduced catch quotas, say it is impossible to make a living when fuel is so expensive.

British tourists caught up in the dispute at the Channel Tunnel terminal near Calais yesterday were - understandably - not interested in the minutiae of the French fisheries' economics. The tunnel had been spared from the port blockade the previous day but the Boulogne fishermen arrived with their crash barriers - under the unblinking eyes of the gendarmerie - not long before 11am.

A number of British motorists got out of their cars to argue with the fishermen. There was some shouting and pushing but no real fisticuffs. A British woman shouted: "Why are you doing this to us? What's this got to do with us?"