Lost in translation: the Castex letter, fish wars and Brexit

The perils of poor translation in international relations are notorious. We saw a fine example this weekend when the French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, pictured above, wrote a by now notorious letter to the President of the European Commission about the Anglo-French fishing spat. His letter, quickly leaked to the press, was full of commonplace banalities including this one: “It is necessary to show clearly to public opinion in Europe that written agreements are non-negotiable and must be respected and there is more detriment (dommage) in leaving the EU than staying a member.”

It is a standard trope from EU leaders since 2016 that Britain cannot have its cake and eat it, or as the French say “avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre”. The decision of some journalists in London to claim Castex used words he did not is hardly a good advertisement for the BBC and other mainstream reporters.

Much of the European media have reported the OBR estimate that Brexit will lead to a 4 per cent drop in British GDP, as well as Boris Johnson offering support to the Polish government in its wish to disregard European law.

However the Castex letter was presented initially as the French Prime Minister having “called on the EU to cause ‘damage’ to the UK”, followed by a front-page Daily Telegraph headline that the EU should “punish” Britain, which in turn was relayed by the BBC news on Saturday morning.

There is no reading of Castex’s letter that can justify these news reports. The word “punish” or “punishment” does not appear anywhere in the text, but the lines about punishment and causing damage to the UK are now circulating widely on social media.

On Monday morning Adam Fleming, who was a first-rate BBC reporter in Brussels and is now a senior BBC politics reporter, repeated the line on BBC Radio Four News that the French PM had called on the EU to “punish” the UK. To be fair, that was the line Downing Street was using yesterday, though it is not even a mistranslation, as the word “punish” is not in the Castex text.

The problem is that there are three players in this latest Anglo-French spat. There are the fishing communities on both side of the Channel. British fishers were promised that Brexit would restore income and glory to the British fishing communities who were sold out by Edward Heath when he sacrificed their interests to enter the EEC 50 years ago.

Alas, this hasn’t happened. The new bureaucracy, imposed by London once the decision to leave the Single Market was taken by Theresa May and confirmed by Boris Johnson, has left many British fishers unable to land their catch in good time. It has also denied them access to European fishing port workers, who did most of the onshore work as Brits don’t like what is smelly, all-hours, low-paid jobs like filleting and storing fish in ice boxes. The French coastal fishing communities from the Belgian to the Spanish border are deeply embedded in local communities and have political weight.

In his diary of the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier writes that on 23rd December 2020 his team was up all night “dissecting the latest legal text that the British have put on the table on fisheries. A text full of traps, false compromises and backtracking.” Yes, but that’s what trade negotiations are like. Boris Johnson overrode his negotiators to “get Brexit done” and left plenty of not quite fully solved problems in the text of the Treaty.

But the third group Mr Johnson must satisfy are his party members and millions of pro-Brexit voters in the UK, who are now worried what they voted for is turning out not to be working to British advantage. Having a mini-war with France over scallops or langoustines cheers up the nation, as once again England is embroiled with its centuries-old rival, even enemy.

So the Brexit saga rolls on and on. The Foreign Secretary Liz Truss maintained the anti-French tone on the BBC on Monday morning. But since it would be quite easy to accelerate the bureaucracy of granting small family-owned fishing boats across the Channel a few licences, there seems no need to assume Downing Street wants to begin a full trade war, not just with France but all countries that export via French ports and the Channel Tunnel.

The French Ambassador in London, Catherine Colonna, gently chided the English journalist class by tweeting that her Prime Minister’s letter had got “lost in translation”, but it is alarming that no one checked what was indeed a false translation. French appears to be banned in the upper echelons of the UK press and even the BBC.

After Waterloo, Britain’s foreign secretary, George Canning, wrote that “the French have but two rules of action: to thwart us whenever they know our object, and when they know it not, to imagine one for us, and set about thwarting that.”

That same is true of many in government in London today, especially the mid-ranking ex-diplomat, Lord (David) Frost. We can expect the Brexit era to be full of many such quarrels, threats, and ugly press comments, on both sides of the Channel.

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