SIR - Patricia Ellis makes a good point in her letter about factory ship trawlers destroying our fish stocks (Forget Party Loyalty, T&A, October 12) but her solution (Brexit) is, I fear, a red herring.

The EU handed out quotas to all fishing boats but they mostly sold them on, which our government allowed, and other EU governments forbade, when the EU law was put into operation in the UK. Today, 80 per cent of our quotas are now owned by just 25 businesses, half of them foreign. It's a scandal and its our government's fault, not the EU's.

After the referendum foreign fishing companies bought more quotas in anticipation of a bigger free for all in UK waters post Brexit. The smaller boats which make up 77 per cent of our fishing fleet between them now only own four per cent of the fishing quotas. These are the people we should be protecting.

If/when Brexit happens there will still have to be fishing quotas and the contracts entered into by the buyers of the current quotas will still be in force.

We need a government that protects the interests of the thousands of smaller fishing boat owners and stops profit hungry big business continuing to privatise and pillage our national fish resources.

Bob Cannell, Heaton Grove, Bradford