European Union rules on fishing quotas have resulted in 800,000 tons of already dead fish being thrown back into the North Sea last year, Nick Griffin MEP has announced.

Speaking during a BNPtv special devoted to providing an insight into the work of the British National Party MEPs in the European Parliament, Mr Griffin revealed the figure in a response to an attack on EU fishing policies by his MEP colleague Andrew Brons.

“The only long term solution to preserve our fishing industry is to withdraw from EU,” Mr Brons said, referring to a recent meeting he had had with representatives of the fishing industry in Britain.

Mr Brons stressed to the fishermen that the long term future of the fishing industry was dependent on getting out of the EU.

“I was at pains to stress that this is not going to happen in the next decade or more, and that therefore the fishermen there need the common fisheries policy to be tweaked,” Mr Brons said.

“So I said that I see my job in the short term to be an effective lobbyist for changes, to avoid for example to avoid the number of days they are allowed to go out fishing to be reduced from 135 down to a mere 90 [per year].”

He said that the “monstrous policy of discarding fish” which are already dead or dying has nothing to do with conservation, but is simply waste.

Mr Griffin then raised the point of the huge amount of dead fish being thrown back because of ill-thought out rules made up by bureaucrats who have no practical experience of the sectors over which they are presiding.

Other topics covered in the 22-minute show included a discussion on the MEP’s support for a petition expressing support for Christians under attack in Iraq, the regeneration of the coal industry in Britain and the EU “bailout” of the Irish banking system.

“The attacks on Christians [in Iraq] are one of the side effects of the highly illegal and irresponsible invasion of Iraq, which replaced a secular socialist dictatorship where there was actually religious freedom and turned it into a hellhole of Islamic extremist hellhole,” Mr Griffin said as Mr Brons signed the petition during the show.

On the topic of a motion which called for the subsidisation of the closure of European coal mines, bother BNP MEPs agreed that the coal industry in Britain had to be recreated in order to help Britain get through a coming power shortage.

Only nuclear power and coal generated electricity, and possibly wave power, will provide the answer, the MEPs said.

Mr Griffin also dismissed talk that the current bailout money being prepared for Ireland was a “bailout of the Irish.

“It is not bailout of the Irish. It is a bailout of the Irish banks and politicians,” Mr Griffin said.

“The best thing that Ireland could do is what Iceland did with their banks, just default,” he said. Iceland is not a member of the EU and is now already well on its way to recovery, as opposed to Ireland which is trapped into the EU as a result of two forced votes,  Mr Griffin added.

The special BNPtv show can be seen in full here.